I Met Her In A Club Down In Old Soho

Linden Lab’s word filter is currently purging “Lola” from The Second Life Marketplace. Don’t panic, “Lola’s” are fine! The issue was reported by Tamarsk on the official Second Life forums and the number of items listed are dropping rapidly. When I started this post 72,685 items were appearing for the search term, now it’s, 71,958. The issue appears to be related to including “Lola” in the feature part of a Marketplace listing rather than in the general description.

Quite why this is happening now remains a mystery but it does highlight yet again the problem of automatic word filters. I’ve pointed out the flaws with Linden Lab’s word filters before, particularly with their forums and Dick Van Dyke. At that time Dick Van Dyke came out as **bleep** Van **bleep**. For a while afterwards Dick Van Dyke was welcome on the message boards, but these days he’s only half welcome as the result is Dick Van **bleep**.

I suppose this saves us from dodgy cockney accents and dancing chimney sweeps. Heaven forbid that someone would want to to talk about the little boy who put his finger in a dyke. I suppose we should all change our spelling to dike.

I despair at issues such as this, well meaning but still largely with The Scunthorpe problem due to automation. These sort of issues aren’t new to Second Life, if we go back to May 2007 we see this exchange at Robin Linden’s office hour over banning the words Loli and Lolita :

Ryozu Kojima: “Gothic Lolita is a fashion style that has nothing to do with Ageplay and it has now been literally swept off the face of search.”

Robin Linden: “Could you please just give it a different name then?”

Well that would have been a workaround. Words in and of themselves are generally not inherently evil, unless the word is evil of course.

Linden Lab do have to tread carefully, I do have sympathy and words can be associated with unsavoury content. However when you ban words with multiple meanings you give power to the meaning with negative connotations.

I’m baffled why Lola is causing a problem now. A lot of Second Life merchants are going to have quite a surprise when they find their items have been unlisted. Whether this is deliberate by Linden Lab remains a mystery, sometimes an update to an automated filter can cause chaos in these situations, but again we’re back to automated filters being a problem.

We’re now down to 68,708 matching items for the term “Lola“, so that’s almost 4,000 items unlisted due to this issue. in the last half hour or so. That’s not nice for merchants who had no idea they were on shaky ground with this word.

However “Lola’s” or “Lolas” which are the more popular product specific terms seem to be ok at the moment, which is possibly a relief to many merchants.

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