Arwen Serpente

@Alexa Linden Please help us with an update on the MP. We have been filing JIRAs, support tickets, and posting issues to the forums for over a month. We thought the MP maintenance on April 6 would correct the bugs. It did not. We have no idea what exactly it did, and, why the bugs we are constantly reporting are not being resolved.

Unreal. We've been waiting over a month for fixes to the mountain of JIRAs, support tickets, and forum posts to fix everything from incorrect sorting (relevance and best selling) to the listing enhancements, and more. Today's MP maintenance did NOT fix those things. What are they thinking? There's got to be a blog post coming to explain what changes they DID make... so far we do know that they changed the default sort to Newest and they made cart contents up to 99 or 100 (?).

Unreal. We've been waiting over a month for fixes to the mountain of JIRAs, support tickets, and forum posts to fix everything from incorrect sorting (relevance and best selling) to the listing enhancements. What are they thinking? There's got to be a blog post coming to explain what changes they DID make...

Voted to watch and added a comment.

This issue with ads disappearing had been fixed (I thought) a couple weeks ago. They must have fiddled with a number of aspects of the MP earlier this week because not only are ads messed up again, but they have now confused "Relevance" sort with "Newest" sort. As Caren mentions above, the JIRA I filed regarding it was closed as expected behavior. I don't know how it can be expected when it is just so obviously wrong. The disappearing ad issue is a serious one that deserves a new JIRA (if it hasn't been created already).

What Caren says is so true. Never before have bugs like this been allowed to drag on for weeks at a time. I've never seen so many JIRAs filed on the same topic. And the number of support tickets must exceed those. The only response we get is a promise of "we're working on it". Out of respect for all of us who use the MP (whether as shoppers or merchants), we do deserve some kind of human response/update from the MP development team.

lol, so much for that theory 🙃

Aside from the fact they should match... It may be linked to the browser in some way - I get the same results at DulceDiva (edited to correct misspelling name - sorry!) when I use Chrome. But, I get completely different results from any posted here when using Firefox. This is just one of the myriad of reasons why there are complaints that the MP is not working as it should. edited to add: Edge gives the same results as Chrome.

When searching for a particular term, yes, keywords will certainly affect results, and there's no doubt that it can be gamed. But when you go directly to a store, without searching a particular term, relevance is not dependent on keywords. Store item order is heavily weighted toward recency of sale, combined with price and rating. That's why this new search is so frustrating - it may be working well for searching particular terms or strings of words, but it has thrown store relevance into a jumble. The relationship was never in this much disarray before. Another way to think of it: Relevance with regard to "search" means the items that come closest to that term or string of words. Relevance with regard to a "store" means those items most closely associated with store itself - hence the ranking dependent on recency of sale, price, rating. It is more akin to the best selling sort (which has always been a source of confusion because it so closely mirrors the relevance sort). It is confusing. You're right, there may be a better default sort for a store than "relevance". Or better yet, make the default sort "sticky" so that the shopper can set it for themselves and not worry about changing it to something different every time they search OR go to visit a specific store unless they want to alter it.

That's your preferred way of shopping and others will do it that way too (I often do too). Others will sort by price. However, the default is relevance and based on sales (for my store and as reported by other Merchants), many shoppers do not change the sort to something else, and they purchase based on what they see first regardless of the age of the item (relevance was weighted with sales recency, rating, price and how well it matches a search term, if used). I see it every day when I check my store - the items sold the day prior show up in the upper spots - and the next round of shoppers who use the default tend to buy those. My top items have sold hundreds and some thousands and they always have appeared as the first items shown in relevance. Now that the system is broken, they don't even show in the first 96 - and they are no longer selling even though prior to these changes they were the most frequently sold.

I think they pulled the lever on the MP relevance slot machine and after the spinning, it came up with a different order. Still wrong, but different.

Of course it is! If it helps, all the better. I did add this same message to my JIRA from March 2 (miraculously still open for comments). All we can do is continue to message them in all ways available to us.

After watching the Lab Gab, it appears that the LL team are so proud of the new search that whatever glitches we experience are considered minor. Hence the "we're working on it but don't have an eta" response. I don't think they understand the difference between relevance when searching a term or string of words versus relevance as a sort when applied to an individual store and not searching for a particular term. Many shoppers go to a store and look at the default relevance sort that is presented, they aren't searching a specific term or item, and buy what they like - impulse - most often the items that appear first in relevance sort. Since the current situation is resulting in a jumble of items, many of which are older items appearing at the top, that may be driving the increase in sales of older items. If store relevance sorting were working properly (recency being a key determinant as it used to be), then the old items would continue to rank high. Except - the sorting is so broken, even that isn't happening.

Hi Samitra, yes, the problems with search and other functions of the MP are quite the topics of discussion. Just search the term "Search" on the forums and a flood of topics will appear: https://community.secondlife.com/search/?q=SEARCH&quick=1

Not sure about this. For "search" as in looking for specific items, relevance may be returning more sensible results. But, with regard to using relevance and/or best selling sorts by individual store, the results are still totally incorrect. And, they have been frozen in place for days at a time, then updating to a different mix of incorrect results, and then remaining frozen for another stretch of days.

I just tried it. I have a proton email account that I rarely use, but it is active and does receive and send email. I couldn't set up a new account with it. I got the same "Hmm...that emails doesn't look quite right. Please try again." error message.

lol, I'm all for magic

Thanks Aishagain! I see the issue "WENG-9476" but the link isn't active. Since all of that activity was from the first go round with the new search back in February, I wonder if WENG-9476 is still open.

Would love to see it. Would you post a link here?

Yes. Wulfie, I know that it is standard to close duplicate JIRAs to maintain order. Part of the point is not just the speed at which they are closed, but that more than 20 residents have felt the need to even file JIRAs on this issue in under a week. That's a tremendous amount of frustration that is being voiced.

I saw that too. They tell us to open JIRAs to report issues and then they are closed almost immediately (as "duplicate"). I count over 20 JIRAs opened since this began last week. Virtually all are closed. Feels like a door slamming in the face.

I filed a support ticket as well - way back when this began - the response I got was a copy/paste "read the blog...file a JIRA". I did file a JIRA. On both the JIRA and the ticket I commented (several times) that we are not being listened to, that the change did not work and both shoppers and merchants are suffering a severe negative impact from it. I have asked repeatedly for a rollback. But no change, no response of when this will be fixed. It is infuriating to see such a complete abdication of responsibility by LL.

Since it appears that LL is taking the "just be patient while we bang on things" approach, they should suspend the MP 10% commission that they take until the MP is back to normal operations. Makes no sense for us to be paying for "service" when we aren't getting any and watching while sales drain away.

This most recent set of changes to the MP have caused so many bugs and glitches that it's hard to keep track. LL asked for reports of issues encountered, so the change to most recently purchased may be an unintended consequence of the changes and should be reported by JIRA. LL is the one way to find out if it is intended to stay at 4 listings or return to the 8.

You're right Wulfie, I am making assumptions. After listening to the discussion group, I'd say that goes both ways (LL making assumptions as well). I've been a merchant since 2008 and lived through the multitude of MP changes, migrations, etc and have yet to see or participate in any formal "marketing survey" that would quantitatively provide direction. It appears that change is driven by qualitative input from a limited pool of stakeholders. For the most part, the changes that are implemented are pretty global and obvious - like improving search. There have been some great additions like expanding categories, separating demos and limited quantities, creating favorites lists, etc. Perhaps attending a meeting would be helpful, I'm just not sure. I'm very disappointed with the most recent events which I know are well intended but are resulting in "unintended" collateral damage.