how gentle is the rain, that falls softly on the meadow?

So...Notch's new game is Eve Online? Do I have that right?

And there's a vampire stripping game out there. Not kidding. Big feature: stopping the vampires from taking over Akihabara by...stripping them. So their skin will be exposed to sunlight.

Yes, really.

For your daily dose of weird, I present Morgan Freeman, Dragonborn. Yeah, I really can't explain that in any way.

(from the bizarre album)

And going through screenshots snapped in various places over the last week, I still can't believe Blood Ink's Nazi imagery position. Which is really sad, because how I originally found Blood Ink was in searching for henna tattoos. It's tragic.

But, on the other hand, my position--RL or SL--has always been for expression, not repression. That may be hard to understand considering some of my vehement opinions, but here's the thing--if I know there's racism, there's bigotry, there's gender devaluation, and it's expressed...well, I know where it is. I can choose not to interact with whoever's espousing the views, and if I feel strongly, urge others not to interact...it's all fair game.

But if it's hidden...if there aren't any obvious clues, it's like sharp glass in the path. We stumble and we're cut and we never saw it coming. That's dangerous. That's scary.

Do I want the designer behind Blood Ink to stop offering up swastikas? Absolutely. Do I want her banned from SL? Absolutely not. And I like the rest of her work.

It's just those five pieces.

And, well, all the copyright violation in most of the rest of her pieces.

We move on again, but this does dovetail nicely into dipping back into the insanity on the Marketplace JIRA.

From Carmella Ruby:

I have unlisted all my products from Marketplace until this is fixed, except for 5 or 6 that are somebody else's listing with my pictures and my free and dollar items. I decided it was better to [lose] the linden than have unhappy customers. Of course some of my product might be in someone else's store I have no idea. I am not sure what a limited number of merchants is but mine were changing throughout the day so felt more comfortable with them out of there, I will just sell in-world until it is fixed and hang on to the commissions.

Here's the biggest problem with this issue dragging on: those who can afford to disconnect from Marketplace will; those who can't will continue to struggle, and suffer because it doesn't work. End result: the Marketplace may suffer overall, and more people will leave Second Life. Those are just facts, not fiction, and facts the Lindens need to fully comprehend.

Parker Frostwych:

Yep, still completely messed up. I only have a small store, but out of 11 items, 10 were affected in various ways (item name/price/description/picture). Tried to edit the listings to make them work right again, but that failed, it just added new listings but kept the wrong ones.

So, think this through: eleven items only, this is not a large store. But that's not the point--eleven items, ten bungled, that's a 90% failure rate.

Kenbro Utu:

Two items affected. Items have correct picture, wrong description, wrong creator, wrong price. Clicking on item takes me to MP home page. I tried editing one item. Deleted 3 incorrect pictures and 8 incorrect associated items, then uploaded a new picture. I updated the listing and it had no effect whatsoever. I inactivated the listing and that had no effect whatsoever.

So let's path this one out:

• two items were discovered to have wrong information
• clicking on one of these items to verify the information resulted in the link taking the maker to the Marketplace home page
• deletion of three incorrect pictures and eight incorrect "related" items was the next step
• uploaded a new picture on the one item that had been checked
• no. effect. whatsoever on the information, picture, or maker's name

So not fixing does nothing (obviously); but so does fixing at this point. There's no way to win.

Sera Lok again:

[H]ow about giving us ANY info whatsoever on what's being done about it, LL? Is this something that each merchant is going to have to file ticket for separately? Is someone working on something that will fix all the listings, what? Communicate, please. When will there be some information about what is being done to fix this?

Please. The Lindens don't communicate. That's part of their corporate culture, I think.

Pearl Vollmar again:

Don't know if this info helps but I just realised that all products affected in my store were listed for the first time on the same date. Not sure I can tell the exact date, but I can find out the month and year at least.

edit: products were listed between Sep 7-10 2010

A-ha! This might mean something, based on the comments below.

From Magnet Homewood:

I have a listing that has been duplicated - the listing is there and completely normal, while there is another listing with the same picture but different title and seller too.

The date it was listed: 9th Sept 2010

So, within the earlier discovered span of time...

From Samantha Zwickel:

The 3 items that had the wrong photo in my partner's shop were listed 9/7/2010

Still within that week.

From Argus Collingwood:

I am still thinking the database may have errors in the 14xxxxx series of numbers.

ETA : you put a number of the borked listing into SLM search like 1418428 then view it as a wrong listing then change that number to 1418429, 430,431 etc etc you can see all those series are borked. /me Points to error

Miss Zwickel weighs in again:

Items referred to above are:
https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Yellow-JesteR-Butchers-Bar/1424518 (Photo corrected, reviews still messed up)
https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Yellow-JesteR-Butchers-Basics/1440146 (Photo corrected, reviews still messed up)
https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Yellow-JesteR-Cranial-Candelabra/1450340 (I haven't gotten around to fixing the photo yet)

Additionally this item belongs to someone else but has the original photos, review (stars), and related items for 1424518
https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Thunderbird-Electric-Bass-Guitar-Jazz-Rock-5/1421596

One of the related items points to the photo for 1450340:
https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Thunderbird-Electric-Bass-Guitar-Jazz-Rock-7/1421598

So, if this is accurate, we may have to redefine what "limited" means, too. "Limited", as I understand it, generally always refers to a small portion. But if "limited" in this instance refers to "only those merchants whose products were migrated in the 14xxxx cluster database migration"...well, that could still be a very large group of people.

Just a limited, large group of people.

From Couldbe Yue:

and my broken one is 1419569 and the corrupt one from someone else that's on my page is 1411527.

looks like that migration was corrupted. I think that was the final one which makes some sense as there had been problems before hand if you remember and we had duplicate items that couldn't be updated, which the final migration was intended to fix (I think, I can't really remember - my notes aren't that comprehensive sadly)

So, the earlier breaking of Marketplace content (which was never fixed) caused duplication of items, but erratically; this breaking of Marketplace content seems to also cause duplication of items, in addition to all the other fun crazy hijinks. So there's a lot of item duplication going on, above and beyond everything else.

From Angus Mesmer:

Confirmed in the shop I was looking at for my previous comment.
Corrupt item ULRs are in the 14xxxxx numbers.

So all the 14xxxx listings are corrupt listings; but can we also assume that all the corrupt listings are 14xxxx listings? Or are there different numbers? And were all of them entries created between 7 and 10 September of this year?

Marcus Zenoria:

I was stunned that LL's closed my support ticket for this ongoing issue and tell me it's resolved.
Their non-existent support stuns me.
https://support.secondlife.com/case-details/01381658/

I'm leaving that link up just in case it resolves later; for me I saw a pink bar that said "Failed to load case # 01381658". Maybe only the resident involved in the resolution can view closed tickets?

Carmella Ruby again:

Well thanks to the user research here I have located my issues are all in the 14XXXX series as well, I only had about 6 or 7 out of maybe 300 listings, not sure if some of my listings are still AWOL in other merchants stores or not and as of this evening I went ahead and updated the artwork in the messed up ones. I will wait now (and check constantly) to see if the edits stick.

Gael Streeter again:

My borked item is #1414723 and the product which is wrongly listed in my store is #1427622...

And, interestingly enough, this comment from Pamela Galli:

I have a non-borked non-DD item # 1478946. Might be beyond the range?

So it's not all 14xxxx series numbers that are auto-borking, just some of them. Damn, I thought we had a fix.

Finally, from Argus Collingwood again:

It is my observation that most borked listings are 14xxxxxx series but not all 14xxxxxx series are borked.

So I guess what we need to path out--since the Lindens apparently can't be bothered--is exactly where the dividing lines are, and how many items are affected. Or at least--as they're starting to do, two days back--figure out which database sector has the greatest corruption.

Maybe with that information in hand, merchants can file tickets that will have attention paid to them by the Lindens. We can only hope.

More later.