The maturity rating nonsense goes on with Linden Lab steadfastly refusing to let us have a sensible dialogue about these issues. Last night I had an issue whereby the parcels on my sim were only showing under adult search, so I contacted Live Chat, who weren’t seeing the problem. Live chat was back to a good sense of support, the guy was extremely polite and went through the steps, I cleared cache as advised and my parcels were moderate again. However they weren’t moderate when I used the website search, I had to add the add filter to see them, although this later rectified itself.
However my classifieds were still being incorrectly flagged as adult, and Linden Lab have so far offered no help whatsoever here, so it’s down to residents to try and help each other, but if you try and do that on the Jira or the blogrum, Linden Lab may well remove your helpful advice, this is quite frankly absurd.
Jira WEB-3646 is an example of helping a fellow resident. I pointed out that the problematic words in the listing were “Slave” and “Slaves“. Having pointed this out, the resident was able to adjust their listing so that it wasn’t incorrectly flagged as adult. The use of the terms here was completely PG, a Master/Slave system has been a PG way of describing computing and other setups for eons. The word itself isn’t adult, and the product certainly wasn’t adult.
However into the fray comes Brooke Linden, to delete my comment because I had the temerity to point out exactly where the problem lay:
“Looks like this had a satisfactory resolution. I had to modify a comment, since we don’t allow posting keywords in JIRA or on Linden Lab managed forums.”
If the words were adult words, I’d have seen Brooke’s point, if the product was adult, I’d have seen Brooke’s point too, but the words aren’t adult and nor is the product. This is where Linden Lab are being extremely silly because it’s merchants who have to work their way around the borked maturity ratings filter and when a solution is found, Linden Lab censor it, presumably because they think someone who has an adult rated product will deliberately circumvent their maturity ratings filter to list their adult product to general audiences. However if someone is doing that, then they are in the wrong, the filter is currently punishing people for using PG language in a PG context, those trying to circumvent the filter to list an item that uses language in an adult context, are going to work out how to do it anyway.
The filter has been badly implement and is a bad solution, it’s making merchants have to do work they shouldn’t need to do. Context is the key, oh but that can’t be policed, so punish people with general listings anyway and don’t allow advice and solutions to PG context being posted anywhere, make the next person with the same problem have to work it out all over again, wasting their time which could be better spent creating items or having fun inworld, instead Linden Lab want them to have to waste time figuring it all out.
I’ve actually created a new classified advert this week to try and figure out why my adverts are adult, I’m paying extra to figure out a bug, I’m sure at this point that Linden Lab would be able to sell me a bridge.
This maturity ratings mess trundles on, with very little help from Linden Lab, the people who implemented it, it’s time for this nonsense to stop. Linden Lab need to stop going out of their way to inconvenience their customers and they should be allowing sensible dialogue about these issues on their servers, not trying to bury it under the carpet.
One word:
Facepalm.
OH HI.
This sounds familiar….
Im with you- the whole thing is asinine.
One more thing- this ratings mess goes in the opposite direction also. Ive told this story many times before, and you may have read it elsewhere. The day they started this new ratings mess, I ran to MP to see what kind of disaster lay in store for us. Here’s what I found:
At the time, there were 28 outfits listed. 9 of them had been flagged *by me* as mature when they were listed, due to nudity on the advertising poster (not adult words in the keywords, and not adult descriptions- it was solely the advertising art in question.) But the Lab is only checking keywords, the most *irrelevant* part of the system, if one is trying to screen adult content from teens, which is their claim. The Lab, in its wisdom, took all nine of those listings and set them to *GENERAL CONTENT*, opening us up to sanctions, even though *I* had listed the outfits properly to begin with.
Checking via keyword is absolutely useless. What needs to be checked are those elements which can be *seen* on the front end. This can clearly be seen in the situation you illustrate above- if some teenager (again this is the Lab’s rationale, after all) does a search in general content for the word “slave”, WHO CARES if s/he ends with a page full of computer stuff? By the same token, most of the keywords on the clothing are g rated, because the nudity on the posters (when it happens) is simply a byproduct of showing how the outfit breaks down, and not the point of the image. But what the Lab did to us is the reverse- creating a situation where a teenager could be looking for something like.. latex (which is NOT an adult or mature keyword), and wind up seeing adult images.
They are trying to do this with a computer program. You can’t.- because it’s not the keywords that need monitoring. It’s the stuff that’s VISIBLE on the front end, and you need a person for that.
Quite, their approach is wrong from the start, exemplified by changing adult items to a lower rating, that should never have happened and shows a lack of forethought.
They are afraid of words at Linden Lab, when you dig beneath the surface of the adult continent moves, it was done for search, people were finding adult content in search too easily, Linden Lab were not bothered so much about adult business on sims, it was people finding said business in search.
So in many ways I shouldn’t be surprised that once more Linden Lab are more concerned about words than they are about content, but it’s such a poor way of dealing with matters.