There has been a lot of talk about how the maturity ratings bugs have plagued the Second Life Marketplace, merchants have found that their items are being flagged as moderate when there’s no obviously moderate material in the post. We’ve had laughter and frustration over “an”, “5”, “Six” and “X” being too hot to handle. However now we have another issue and this one certainly manifests itself inworld when using Viewer 2.4, I don’t know about other viewers.
The issue is with reagrds to inworld classifieds being filtered to the wrong category. I was alerted to this by Medhue Simoni’s post on the blogrums and sure enough, I found that my adverts for Pirate clothing and an advertisement for workers in a roleplay tavern could only be found in search if I ticked the adult rating box.
I’m not quite sure why this isn’t being talked about more, maybe it’s because people, like me, have all three maturity ratings checked normally, so we don’t check these sort of issues, or if it’s because merchants are more focussed on the marketplace. Maybe it’s only an issue specific to viewer 2.4, although I find that hard to fathom due to how search works these days, it’s not tied to the viewer.
To test this, go to search, go to the classifieds tab, type in some words from your classified to ensure it shows up and then tick off the maturity ratings one by one to see which rating your advert fits into. The blogrum post was about adverts only appearing under the adult rating, as some of mine do, but a related Jira report, Jira-WEB-3578, talks of General clasifieds being moved to moderate. The Jira does talk of a website search, but the issue is the same inworld.
An example of one of my adverts that are only showing with adult rating ticked:
“Well Shiver me Timbers you want to look like a Pirate? You’ll find some of the finest Pirate wear around here on the Isle of Dee. If swashbuckling’s your game, then this place should be your aim, nobody wants to be a tardy pirate so look the part.”
I’m not at all sure how that can be considered adult! The sim itself is moderate and although I’d set the advert as General, because the content is General, if it had been moved to Moderate I’d have thought it was part of the drive to protect innocent teen eyes, as show in search has been changed to not include Moderate sims when searching on a General maturity level only.
However it hasn’t been moved to Moderate, it’s adult and I’m really not sure what’s going on here but these maturity ratings bugs are out of hand already, we really don’t want more damage done to inworld visibility, the search fiasco has already done enough damage. The maturity ratings filter should be switched off until Linden Lab can sort these bugs out, because in terms of reach, these are big bugs and people are paying for exposure via classifieds. Sometimes you need to stop digging, Linden Lab are digging a big hole here, they need to take a step back and give merchants some breathing space.