Proposal: A Kinder Gentler "You Effed Up" function

[Darrius Gothly]

We're all familiar with reporting items on the Marketplace for violations. The process is supposed to be that we mark or flag them, Linden Lab staff reviews our flag then decides what action should be taken. But what if ...

One of the options available was "Let the Merchant know they have an issue"? Then you could select different things to let them know about. For example:

• You've used too many keywords and/or keywords that don't apply
• You've placed this under the wrong category
• The permissions show XYZ but it only has XY
• The pictures appear wrong or are missing
• etc.

The idea being that it's a cooperative "hey I think you might have missed this" communication rather than an "I'm gonna tell the teacher on you!"

People get some fixed number of these reports per day, and any time you try and send a report to the same Merchant twice, you get an "You've already bugged them. Are you sure?" prompt.

Merchants would get notified by email same as they do with Reviews and other administrative actions. One of the links available in the email would be "block reports from this person". AND the actual reporter is never identified to the Merchant. They are recorded in the database for Linden Lab to see, but not the Merchant.

That would also give LL a quick database query to find out how true allegations are of "someone has it out for me" simply by looking up who sent reports and how many times they did it.

The email would also contain such things as: 

• The current keywords if the report is about keywords
• A link to the Edit Listing page for that product
• Links to various Guideline and Standards documents that might help a Merchant understand why they got a report on their product.
• A link to the web page showing the ENTIRE tree of product categories with the proper one suggested if it was included by the reporter

Anyway .. just free-thinking ...

[Sassy Romano]

Logical, effective, useful.

Definitely one for the "won't do" basket, along with all the other amazingly simple yet high value things.  There's so much low hanging fruit to be picked, it's pretty much weighing the branches down and touching the floor.  Give it a bit longer and the fruit will ferment.

Darrius, you should know that you have to come up with useless ideas if you want them implemented, something like... a request for smaller product pictures or a reduction in the number of listings a merchant can have.

Oh wait!  How about a Share this on Google+ button?  (do we have one of these already?)

[Darrius Gothly]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

Logical, effective, useful.

Definitely one for the "won't do" basket, along with all the other amazingly simple yet high value things.  There's so much low hanging fruit to be picked, it's pretty much weighing the branches down and touching the floor.  Give it a bit longer and the fruit will ferment.

Darrius, you should know that you have to come up with useless ideas if you want them implemented, something like... a request for smaller product pictures or a reduction in the number of listings a merchant can have.

Oh wait!  How about a Share this on Google+ button?  (do we have one of these already?)

---

I had to come up with a workaround to get that share thing working. Basically I routed it through Facebook, over to Pinterest and then past Twitter on its way to YouTube. And since Google owns YouTube .. Presto!

Ain't telrockogy fun!

[Butch Daddy]

I am trying to understand this idea.

Linden would set up the system so that anonymous users, like myself, could spam merchants with thousands of emails about their items with impunity?

So I could create an unlinked alt, and harass sellers until Linden got around to banning my alt account? And then I could just another unlinked alt to do the same thing over and over again?

Or I could get the 500 people in my group to harass a competitor by all sending them 1 email per item flooding their email account with junk emails coming from Linden Lab, effectively getting the Linden email address spam blocked so that no one will ever get another email from them again?

 

Rock on!

 

I think this is a fantastic way to grief competitors without having to flag the items and hope someone from Linden will do it for me.  

[Darrius Gothly]

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Jacob Cagney wrote:

[snip] ...

Rock on!

I think this is a fantastic way to grief competitors without having to flag the items and hope someone from Linden will do it for me.  

---

This is the kind of "screw you first" attitude that is not only too prevalent these days (old man lecture time .. nahhh!) but is also completely preventable. The sort of "DDOS" (Distributed Denial of Sales) attack you describe is easily stomped at the outset just by limiting the number of emails per day that any one Merchant can receive. Or even more functional, simply send a "Daily Digest" that summarizes the day's reports.

One email containing 10,000 complaints is a pretty good indication of a coordinated attack. One email containing 2, 3 or even 10 reports .. not so much. And even if you stage your assault in slow waves or in a steady stream, your net effect is to simply provide ample evidence to the Merchant AND to Linden Lab who all of your functionaries are.

So yes Jacob ... please by all means go on the attack. I'll be waiting over here with the fire extinguisher .. waiting to spray a few feeble drops of foam at the smoldering corpses of you and all your "friends".

Mwwaahahahahahaaa!!!

(Amateurs!)

ETA: It dawned on me that the Marketplace web pages know when you are logged in that you are also a Merchant. It would be quite simple to limit such reports to fellow Merchants. So, you wanna go on a rampage? You're gonna have to do it from your real seller account. I'm pretty sure that would put a REAL damper on those anti-competitive raiding parties.

[Butch Daddy]

Yo Darrius,

Sorry you didn't get the sarcasm in my post.  Next time I will preferace it with tags. <sarcasm> </sarcasm> just to help you out

The LAST damn thing I want from Linden Lab is for them to set up a way for a bunch of know-it-alls to have a way to blast my email address with form messages about my stuff.

So, no.  

You have had a lot of really awesome suggestions over the years for how TPTB could truly make things better, but this time, I cannot agree with you on this idea.

 

 

 

[Darrius Gothly]

*GRIN* Yes, please. I do need those reading aids from time to time. (Okay .. FINE! Comprehension Aids! LOL)

Your ideas though were valid, and you pointed out holes in the intial idea. So no harm, no foul there. I think though the solutions I proposed will indeed keep the tool out of the hands of harmful fools, and put it in the hands of us merely clueless ones.

And it does "feel" to me like more of a community building capability. I think that since you'd have to really identify yourself (to LL only) that it would lessen the abuse value and keep people from using it .. even to the extent they now use ARs. But that's more a human psychology thing than a systems design thing. Whatever humans tend to do or want to do, we can "guide" them with proper tech.

It just has to be the RIGHT guidance.

[Poenald Palen]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

Logical, effective, useful.

Definitely one for the "won't do" basket, along with all the other amazingly simple yet high value things.  There's so much low hanging fruit to be picked, it's pretty much weighing the branches down and touching the floor.  Give it a bit longer and the fruit will ferment.

Darrius, you should know that you have to come up with useless ideas if you want them implemented, something like... a request for smaller product pictures or a reduction in the number of listings a merchant can have.

Oh wait!  How about a Share this on Google+ button?  (do we have one of these already?)

---

Fermenting fruit totally reminds me of drunk animals in the wilds. Maybe they need to get those primates that bang on the servers with blunt objects in a choatic fashion to get the servers to keep working all drunk for them to be effective?

That pic was a reference to "choas monkey" I found out, funny stuff.

I suggest they implement trees that grow fermented fruit in world, and animals that get drunk on them. Of course this is not a survival runner where you lose your avatar permantently if they beat you and you lose to much blood. Then, both user accounts statitistics go up and people can't claim SL is not a game anymore AND can't claim it is not real life, because if an avatar is alive and then can die it means it is alive...right?