don't let the wolves in, pretty girls

If you ever really wanted to be a space marine...but found yourself just a wee too feline and girly for the big huge testosterone-ridden Space Marine Corps...now there's hope.

If you can call that hope.

(And also found in poking about the Marketplace--if you ever, for whatever crack-headed reason, want a badly misspelled tattoo--I've found one. You can thank me later.)

And in other tattoo-related news, scanning through the broken stuph on the Marketplace also led me to Blood Ink, and the fact that they have Nazi tattoos. In fact, because of the seeming prevalence of their swastika work, I went through their store. They list two hundred and eighty-six items on the Marketplace. Of those, over one hundred of them are patent copyright violations, and five are directly related to Nazi or SS symbology.

Do I even have to bring up the fact that neither of those are supposed to exist on SL according to the Linden rules? But then, I forget. The Lindens are currently ignoring their own rules and griefing the Marketplace on their own. Fun times.

WE MOVE ON.

[Oxxxxxx Sxxxxxxx]: this is a twisted service announcement: be careful when unboxing. Contents may be fluffy. It is important to keep the clawed end away from you at all times when unboxing. Thank you and happy hunting!

And back into the JIRA chaos, this time with brief breaks for tea and kittens.

We lead off with Angus Mesmer:

When I check an online shop, as I type this:
-Some listing have wrong names and creators, while the image is that of the product that is supposed to be sold in the shop.
>>1) clicking the Image and Name will send me back to the Marketplace homepage. Clicking the name of the creator sends me to what might be their actual shop, but is empty/does not contain the item whose name appears on the erroneous listing.
>>2) Clicking the Image and Name will send me to the listing, the image is that of the proper item, but the description corresponds to the item whose name appears on the listing. The "Visit Shop" link sends you to the shop owned by the person making the item whose name appears on the listing.

In those cases, the price is that of the wrong items.

The broken listings do not respect the General/Moderate/Adult ratings at all. Which I consider very bad. I am probably not the only person in this case. One of the wrong names was for a sex sofa. While using a General browsing rating.

Which I thought was one of the things the ratings system, and the fruitlessly arcane and ever-changing banned words list, was supposed to prevent.

Emmas Twin is the first to report the now-constant stream of complaint notecards from customers:

I have the same issue, I logged into game today only to receive a rather nasty im from someone accusing me of stealing her pictures with malicious intent and a threat to report me. After which I checked my listings and found this problem not only on this account but on my other account too and have had to remove all my listings. So annoyed, more for the fact I am receiving ims from irate merchants claiming I'm stealing their products.

As I mentioned earlier, those residents who don't read the forums, keep an eye on the status update, or are members of SL Universe aren't going to know what's going on, and their first instinct is likely going to be as Miss Twin mentioned: threaten first, figure it out later. This is going to cause a needless amount of stress--in fact, it already has--which could have easily been avoided with more testing, better coding, and taking the time to full integrate something before rushing on to the next shiny toy.

Because keep in mind, the Marketplace has been functionally broken for months, and instead of fixing those problems, the Lindens decided they wanted all new ones. Why? Still think I'm on target with the Lindens trying to drive us all away, so they can sell a mostly empty world to some bigger (or vastly smaller and clueless) firm, so that the problems of SL won't matter to the Lindens anymore. Because they'll have their money, and be long gone.

The d'awww of Scottish folding.

Moriko Inshan again:

I have again, for the third day in a row, checked every single of my MP listings. All appear fine, but as we have learned, that does not mean that my images, or products do not appear in a fellow merchant's store. I have not migrated to DD, and do not intend to do so until these very serious issues are resolved. The cut off date for Magic Boxes needs to be moved out from the May deadline by a few months are the very least. Personally, I do not feel it is safe to do any changes to any of my Marketplace listings while everything is in such a mess.

And if the Lindens won't shut down the Marketplace, you can always choose to employ Ms. Inshan's option, which is also making the rounds--telling your personal group not to shop on Marketplace, and telling your subscription customers the same. Which will, slowly but effectively, filter out until Marketplace will be viewed with dread and mistrust for simply existing.

This is also nothing the Lindens want. So why aren't they stepping in and being proactive about this, instead of standing around with the blinds drawn, and pretending everything's just peachy?

jouet Jestyr:

This matter is being handled very poorly by LL. If a commerce site like Amazon had this issue, they'd take the site offline until it was fixed.

The advice given by the commerce team doesnt work.

Close it down and fix it, please.

There's not a thing wrong with her comment. Any of the bigger services, who would stand to lose far more money, would close down their database in a heartbeat if something like this happened to them. The Lindens? Give out worthless advice to premium customers (thereby angering them further), refuse to do anything but tell us "We're on it" like a useless parrot nailed to his cage bar, and still never fixed the problems that people were screaming about before this, thereby breaking Marketplace in just about every way possible, save for a malformed internet address.

And I'm sure they're working on that, too.

The Chesterfield Hotel afternoon tea service.

hoohaa Anaconda:

I have spent the past few hours searching deep into the marketplace and what I am finding is beyond belief I have come across a few stores that have around 90+ products where not just 1 or 2 items are affected but every single item is affected there are literally 90 different creators listed in one store. Follow the Store links that aren’t supposed to be there and you will find an almost spider web effect of complete destruction. This has got to be fixed ASAP

But it won't be. I think we all understand this at this point.

customesculpties Leider:

This is the biggest mess ive seen in sl history

I think I can say the same, and that counts the OpenSpace debacle, the entirety of Ursula/Zindra, the ageplay explosion, and I'll even throw in replicating griefing objects and the "grey goo" attacks of 2006.

CouldBe Yue chimes in:

yay me, I only have one listing that has been screwed.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Satiated-Desires-Bondage-Pleasure/1419569 [The original item--Editrix] and this https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/P3-Let-It-Snow-Gold-PROMO-Priced/1411527 [The remapped picture over the text and title of a General-rated holiday dress in gold]

I'm sure the owner of the second listing is thrilled to pieces to have the item now rated adult and I'm not particularly happy that my adult item is now rated general.

You wouldn't think that LL would have ignored this for so long but apparently they're made of sterner stuff. I'm laying bets that everyone working on the marketplace has gone home for the weekend, stroking themselves over a job well done.

[edit to add more information] I tried to update my listing by replacing the picture, updating the maturity rating and unpacking info (the only things that I could see had changed.. well apart from all the relevance details - grrrr). When I submitted, I got this error

1 error prohibited this Product from being saved

There were problems with the following fields:

The Xstreet product ID '1325134' already exists. Please provide a unique Xstreet product ID.

Which you may remember from the XSL migration.

It did however replace the picture but hasn't updated the rest of the details (ie, it's still stuck in the general maturity rating, with the wrong unpacking details, maturity rating and relevance details).

Oh, indeed, lots of fun there.

Kitten and bunny!

Maxx Farella:

Before direct delivery became active my partner noticed in her top selling products screen that she had other merchants items in there. But her actual store listings were all correct at that time. As direct delivery became active I converted my items about 8 at a time and the process seemed to go very smoothly for me (to my surprise lol). I checked my listings after doing so and all seemed to be good so I now have removed all my magic boxes from in world. It was only a few days later as I checked through my store that I noticed the listings getting mixed up with other merchants items.

I am unable to edit or fix some of these items as they appear to be broken. I have replaced some of the wrong textures on my product so they are not showing some one else picture but I'm reluctant to mess too much with it as I am unsure what Linden labs are doing to resolve this issue.

It doesn't appear that they are treating this problem with much urgency unfortunately. The only fix I see they did do in the last maintenance was to fix the review count/ratings.

And I'm hearing this more and more often, now--that this isn't a new problem, it just wasn't affecting everyone yet. Now it is.

Gael Streeter:

We can not fix all the errors manually! This is technically impossible because some are not manually correctable!

And to reinforce why this is so shockingly bad, that's because this is what the commerce team is telling people to do, which means not only are they giving out wrong advice, but they're not even bothering on callbacks to change their tune. No one on Concierge that I've heard of has bothered to learn anything else about this issue.

The Duck & Bunny traditional tea service. (The entire post is worth reading, though.)

Sen Pixie:

I updated to DD, checked all my listings (which had all imported correctly), removed the MB items from the website, and promptly deleted my box. I followed the steps to the letter from the LL produced Youtube video. I then rechecked all my listings and all were fine.

Three days later, out of my 70 listings, I ended up with 20 that had incorrect images, 5 became unlisted, and 2 had items associated from other makers, placing those items in their store as well.

About 12 of those products with incorrect images were old enough that I only had *.bmp files on my HDD, adding another couple hours of work to an already time consuming "fix."

LL, I'm a programmer, I know things go wrong. However, to leave the MP up and running while such an egregious problem goes on is not only irresponsible, but opens you up to possible liability issues as you may be knowingly allowing IP rights violations to continue after you were the original cause.

Let's talk about that again, since it really does seem that the Lindens are wholly blind to this point.

Who knows who's actually coding, but let's just make a name up for the fun of it--say "Bukkit Linden" is the chief of Marketplace programming. He and his team have been working tirelessly to break Marketplace in every way possible, in between practicing their evil laughs in large, echoing underground chambers (before walking outside for a brisk stroll to find puppies to kick and babies to light on fire). One of their most inspired hacks to their own software resulted in copiable items being delivered multiple times.

Sleepy kitten.

Ph3ARMeeImmaHackzorz Resident went to the Marketplace, and ordered one item, a dress with custom shading and textures, as a gift for the girlfriend he hopes to get by showing her a picture of his bedroom and the large tub of pudding on the nightstand. It delivers to him. Then delivers again. Then delivers again. Then delivers again.

The next morning, he now has twenty-five copies of this dress. They're all transferable, even though the merchant's listing said no-transfer. Being stupid and evil-minded (a bad mix, to be sure), he coordinates with some of his hacker friends, and they tell him to join twenty-five freebie groups, and pass the dress out.

The dress proceeds to go the rounds. This wasn't someone acquiring this dress in an underhanded fashion. The Lindens gave out the dress. The Marketplace kept giving out the dress, resulting in multiple copies. And all it takes is one dishonest person...

Suddenly, SweetLilOne Shenandoah is seeing her dress everywhere. She tracks it down in groups. She tracks it down in freebie zones. Someone she's never even met is sitting in a welcome area just giving the dress out to everyone that walks within range.

Mismatched vintage china for an afternoon tea service (and all in truly excellent condition, besides).

How, at this point, does Ms. Shenandoah stop the copyright infringement? She can't get the dress back; it was a legal sale. She can't go after the hacker, because--even though he largely contributed to both the loss of her sales and her ensuing panic--he paid for one item, he got that one item, and it should have come with her originally set permissions intact.

But it didn't. Why didn't it? Because Bukkit and his team did everything wrong.

So who's she going to complain to? The Lindens? Like they care. The Linden legal department? Please, they laid off their law team. So who? Who is going to listen to her entirely valid concern, here?

My answer? No one. Not a single Linden. They're not even concerned.

Happy kitten!

I hope that helped as the ranting continued. More later. Have a nice day.