MP listing names in "other" languages

I'll start off by mentioning that when I say "other" languages I mean it from my perspective. I'm British and I speak and write English so I'm obviously viewing this from the perspective of someone who views the Second Life marketplace in English.

I was first alerted to this by Reven Rosca of Meshoptotamia and PRIME fame and it has been written up as BUG-6194. When she first pointed me at it I was kind of confused. While I've always found it a little inconvenient that the listing title got overwritten when doing a quick fill it's never been that much of a hassle -- a quick edit and it's fixed. And, recently, I've even found it useful that it has overwritten it.

The part that really had me confused though was the mention of the issue regarding language. At Z&A we only ever list items in English and, as far as I'd always known, in the absence of anything written into a different language's tab on the marketplace page for a given product, it shows the English details. And it does. Only...

Take this screenshot of a selection of Z&A products. Each one's carefully named. All we've ever done, ever, is edit the English title and text. Each and every one has also been made by creating a listing from an unassociated item, quick filled from another similar item, and then the listing title set correctly:

As you can see, all the names are correct. You can match the listing title with the title you see in the vendor image itself. But look what happens if you switch the marketplace to German and view the same listings:

Every single one has the wrong listing name! The reason is obvious, of course. At some point, for some reason, the listing title for the Z&A Body Cage (or something that was quick filled from it) has had the title copied over into the German language listing details. This has then, over time, been propagated into lots of other listings when quick fill has been used. Thing is, that copying (from English to German) won't have been done by us. And, talking to Reven, it looks like she's got the same issue happening and neither would she have done that with her listings.

What's even odder is that this doesn't seem to be happening for everything. Looking through our listings I can see lots of products that I know were created using quick fill that are just fine, and then there's a whole load of them that are wrong.

It looks like we've got a lot of work on our hands, going through all the listings and cleaning them up. You might want to do the same with yours too. If you've never done it before, or haven't done it in a long time, now's the time to visit your MP shop and select a different language here:

and see what it looks like. There's a good chance that you've got listings with very wrong titles.

Edit to add: I'm starting to go though some listings to see what's what. One odd thing I am noticing is that in every single case the Spanish tab, and only the Spanish tab, has a full copy of the English tab. All the details. So, with some listings, I'm seeing fully-populated English details (written by me), the listing title (and only the title) filled (and often older) for all other languages, except Spanish, which is the English all over again.

Further edit to add: I've just found some listings where the English was correct, all languages except Spanish had empty details (as they should) but with the wrong listing title (which should have been empty) and the Spanish was all the details from a totally different product again (one of ours).

Another edit to add: I've just noticed that if I view Z&A's shop in German a minority of listings have the wrong name. On the other hand, if I view our shop in Spanish, the majority are wrong. Here's what seems to be happening: a minority appear to have somehow had "Z&A Body Cage (Steel)" assigned to the listing title in all languages and, over time, this has propagated via quick fill. But note only the title. On the other hand, Spanish seems to be a special case. The Spanish language tab appears to get filled with all the details from the English tab of the product listing I'm quick filling from. So the rule appears to be that if you're working in English (at least) and you quick fill product B from product A both the English and Spanish tabs get filled with the English details of product A. If you never think to look at the Spanish tab (why would you, you'd expect it to be empty) you'll have all your listings wrong in Spanish.

Final edit of the night to add: Going back to our oldest listings, ones that existed on the old XStreet and were migrated during the great migration, I can see that the Spanish language tab is filled with the English and that all the other language tab are empty. That in itself isn't an issue. The Spanish tab contains the same text as the English tab so the product listings are fine. The problem comes with all products that were created post-migration and were created using quick fill. From then on you pretty much seem to end up with listings that are the correct English (of course) but the wrong Spanish because the Spanish tab is the Spanish tab from the listing you copied from, which is the English of the originating product. Simply put: if you quick fill a lot and you've filled from pre-migration listings you might have a lot of badly-worded listings when viewed in Spanish.

Out of the iso helmet (and a final Goth Fair visit)

A little earlier today, given that the required time was up, Mistress released me from the "roller bane" outfit I've been locked in for the past couple of days. It was quite a contrast too, going from the very dark world I've been in:

...to something a lot brighter:

Unlocked, I changed into a fresh outfit so we could make a last visit to the Goth Fair. While changing Mistress discovered a little prank I'd left for her last night. The previous day she'd joking told me that I wasn't to leave any tire marks in the house or there'd be trouble. Well, I couldn't let that pass could I?

After conveying her amused displeasure she teleported us away so we could take a look around the last bits of the fair. Again, there wasn't much for me (the PG region seemed to be pretty light on things relevant for male avatars) but Mistress found a handful more demos.

Having finally seen the whole of the fair it was time to head home again. Once we got home Mistress decided to knock another item off my allowance backlog. This time it's to be locked in nothing but a chastity belt for 24 hours. After a very heavily-restricted week this feels rather odd. Thankfully it allows me to do a job I've been wanting to do all week: rearrange part of the Z&A main store so that the newer product ranges have space to expand as we retire the older ones.

First though Miss Vila had other plans for me. She'd not forgotten about the tire marks and so, when we got home, she used my Sub HUD's invisible leash to leash me to a bucket for 1/2 hour of in-world time and ordered me to clean up.

Another quick visit to the Goth Fair

Earlier today Mistress and I managed to get about 50 minutes in-world so we decided to head off to the Goth Fair again. So far we've done the adult and moderate areas and there's just the third location left. Despite my current state we didn't really see an issue with my outfit which, really, is roller-skating Tron-a-like spaceman thing. Given that we want to see it all before it finishes this weekend we headed off.

This, however, was going to be an interesting visit for me. We'd very quickly dipped in the first time we visited as there was a specific shop I wanted to visit and one thing we noticed was that it was the least dark of all the locations. So it's a little ironic that the Z&A Isolation Helmet that I'm locked in right now made it the darkest yet!

This time around I did no shopping, mostly because I didn't see anything that really took my fancy. On the other hand we found some very interesting items for Miss Vila and she's grabbed quite a few demos (she was especially excited to see someone making some rather interesting eyebrows). I'm looking forward to seeing what she thinks of them.

Mostly though all I did was skate around behind Mistress and, at any possible opportunity, remind her that I was struggling to see anything. "Oh, look at that!" "I can't Miss, it's too dark". Etc...

At one point I did remind Miss Vila that the helmet has different levels of forced darkness and that she could lighten it for the duration of the visit to the fair. A reply of "Why on Earth would I want to do that?" made it pretty clear I wasn't getting away with that.

Sadly, all too soon, because I had a RL commitment, it was time to head home and say goodnight.

There's just a little bit of the fair left which, hopefully, we'll get to cover in the next day or so.

Roller bane

Another day, another allowance payment. Last night Mistress and I spent a little time together and, while doing so, having served my time on the quadcopter, I was locked in a new outfit from the current backlog: the roller bane.

This is an outfit that got put together, mostly by accident, back in February, and that Mistress really liked. Consequently it got added to the list when it got rewritten. For the next couple of days my world is going to be very dark and spooky.

On top of that I'm denied a few other things. For one I can't change outfits. For another I'm denied the ability to start an IM session. If a group IM opens, or someone IMs me, I can take part. On the other hand I can't open a group chat or IM someone I'm not already speaking to. I'm also denied the ability to say anything in local. Just to make life more interesting I'm also denied the ability to see my location, my mini-map, the world map, avatar names or hover text. All of these things combine to make my SL not impossible, but very awkward.

I was planning on rearranging the shop this evening but, right now, I'm not sure that's really going to be possible. While I do have the right to edit and move things it's made almost impossible by the fact that I can't see more than 20m.

Twenty questions about my SL

It's that time again. That time when I relax the not-really-a-rule of not doing every meme-a-like thing doing the rounds and be sociable and take part. Like last time it's one of Strawberry's meme posts that got my interest. The questions are pretty interesting and I think I'll have fun "discovering" my answers.

So here goes...

1. When and how did you discover Second Life? -- I originally signed up mid 2006, although I'd known about it for some time before then. I'd been interested by the idea of it for some time but never went past the stage of reading about it for ages. Then, late one Friday afternoon, I got curious and created an account.
2. Did you know about virtual worlds before or was this your first experience with them? -- Depends on what we mean by "know" here. The idea of virtual worlds has been around rather a long time and given that I've always been into science fiction, and have always been involved with computing (both as a hobby and as work), it's a thing that I can't really remember even not being on on radar. And then there was all the time "wasted" playing LAN-based FPS type games too.
3. Has Second Life met your expectations? -- More than met. It's exceeded them. I joined expecting it to be a bit rubbish and something that likely wouldn't hold my interest too long. It didn't for the first few years, I'd dip in and out and that was it, but since early 2010 there's hardly been a day when I haven't been in-world for some period of time.
4. If you could teleport back to the first ten minutes of your avatar’s slife, what would you tell yourself? -- I'd tell myself that that L$5 (grabbed from money trees) I kept in my account for ages really wasn't anything special and that I should buy a few L$ and go have lots of fun.
5. How long did it take you to master avatar flying and driving vehicles inworld? -- I can't really remember not being able to fly or drive a vehicle.
6. Do you have a mystery alt? -- Technically I am the mystery alt.
7. Is your SL avatar a reflection of you, or someone you wished you could be? -- A bit of both. When I'm logged in my approach to people and reactions to people, etc, are no different than RL me. My in-world desires and interests aren't that different from part of my RL either. In-world they're just amplified a little and allowed to run a little wilder.
8. Is there an individual you met in SL that inspired you in your RL? How? -- Not really, no. That's not to say that I'm not lucky enough to consider some amazing people as friends in-world, it's just that my in-world friends and acquaintances are something that stays very much in-world. Only one person spans both worlds and we knew each other before we both got together in-world.
9. Do you feel it is easier to create stronger bonds/relationships with people you meet inworld as opposed to the real world? -- Not really. I think I find it easier to make smalltalk in-world, mostly because in-world it's easier to meet up with like-minded people, but I wouldn't say my in-world relationships are in any way stronger than my RL ones. I'm naturally introverted and cautious in both.
10. Did you ever imagine or believe people could fall in love with someone they never met before Second Life? -- As others have said in answer to this question, this has been a thing long before Second Life, or even the Internet, existed. I think you'd have to be pretty shallow and narrow-minded to imagine it isn't possible to fall in love with someone you've not physically met.
11. How has your perspective of dating changed (or not) since you started playing second life? -- I can't say it's changed at all. Then again I've never been in SL for "dating", at least not in the "going and seeking a date" sense.
12. How has your perspective of employment changed (or not) since you started playing second life? -- Again, it hasn't really changed at all. As a software developer the idea of making a living from "virtual goods" has never been anything other than totally natural to me.
13. Name three things in both your lives that overlap each other significantly. -- Miss Vila, programming and... erm.... Zardia! ;)
14. If you could live your life more immersively in a virtual world, would you? (Kind of like the Matrix) -- Yeah, no hesitation. Not to the exclusion of RL but I'd love to try it and I imagine I'd really love it. We encourage kids to get lost inside their own heads through play and reading and the like and then, for some odd reason, we often discourage it in adults. It's as if being imaginative and enjoying your own head is seen as a bad thing. Having tools to get totally inside your own head would be awesome.
15. How do you think behaviour changes for people if they’re inworld vs in real world? Why do you think that is? -- People can be arseholes in both words. People can be wonderful in both worlds. People can be entitled pricks in both words. People can be helpful and generous in both worlds. I don't much buy into the "anon makes people worse" line of thinking (down that route lies such nonsense as Google's nymwars). People will be what they are.
16. How has second life consumerism changed your perception of spending habits, the value of money, the need to be “bleeding edge” with fashion? -- I can't say it's changed my perception one bit. Then again I don't really do the fashion thing in either world.
17. Do you think virtual worlds like SL drive and redefine human interaction or do they narrow and limit it? -- Neither. People who think they narrow and limit it are, in my experience, narrow-minded bigots. On the other hand people who think that virtual worlds are the coming of a whole new paradigm of human interaction tend to be single-issue obsessives who care more about the technology, or their own punditry, than anything else.
18. If technology progressed tomorrow to allow you to send emotions to people the way you’d send text or voice messages, would it enrich your SL experience or infringe on it? -- If you're not sending emotions with text now you're probably doing it wrong.
19. Name three skills you attribute to having learned or honed in second life alone. -- I'm not sure that I really can. Generally it tends to be the other way round. The things I do in SL tend to be an extension of or an exploration of things in my RL.
20. If your grand kids googled your Second Life Avatar’s name, would they be intrigued, disgusted, proud or something else? -- While I suspect this question is aimed at how I'd view myself and what can be found about me on the web it's really more of a question of how mature and open-minded these future offspring of mine will be. That's their problem, not mine. ;)

An unfortunate top-up

Yesterday evening, after a long weekend of not seeing her, Mistress and I finally got together. While she'd kept up with my banishment exploits by viewing the album on imgur this was the first time we'd got to chat in person since I'd done it.

I was also getting rather low on my teleport allowance (in fact I only had the 1 teleport left -- if I'd gone anywhere the only way I could have got home again would be to use the emergency TP button, which would land me in my cell) so I had to ask for a top-up too. Mistress also suggested that we should see about me paying off some more of the allowance payment backlog. Before she did though it was time to pick another payment from the punishment picker to pay for the extra TPs.

That didn't go so well.

When Mistress rewrote the contents of the picker to better please her she added a "Domme's wildcard" punishment. The idea being that, if that comes up, she gets to pick anything she likes (either on the list or not). I cheekily suggested that perhaps there should be a sub's wildcard too, I get to pick my own "punishment". Mistress agreed that that was a good idea and she'd add it but with the addition of "and pick another 3 punishments" on the end.

And that's just the one I picked. So, while I do get to choose my own payment at some point in the near future, I also now had these added to the list too:

• Be confined to a Pod Prison of your Domme’s choice for 5 hours.
• Wear the metal yoke for 3 hours.
• Be gagged for 3 hours.

So, rather than the list getting shorter, it's getting longer and longer (and now I'm looking at two long sessions in Pod Prisons too!).

Anyway, Mistress decided that she'd make a start on things. She picked two items off the current list and combined them. She decided to lock me on a vehicle of her choice (in an outfit of her choice) for 5 hours and she combined that with the just-picked 3 hours in a gag. Mistress decided that the Z&A Light Bulb Gag and Quadcopter would make for an amusing combination:

Being rather proud of her idea she then leashed me to her and stormed off across the sim, very obviously with a plan in mind...

Soon, as we sat together, and the Sun went down, it became obvious what she'd thought of. Apparently I make an excellent reading light:

Eventually it was time for us to log out again so we headed home. Mistress informed me that I was banned from the house while locked on the Quadcopter, a decision she might possibly regret. She decided to get into bed for a nap but, for some reason, all she could hear was this constant buzzing of electric motors just outside her bedroom window...

I can't imagine what the cause could have been. *looks all innocent*

A second visit to Zindra

This weekend has been a little busy with RL so in-world time and SL-related time has been in short supply. That didn't stop me finishing my second 5 hours banished, but it did stop me from writing it up until now. What follows is a few highlights from the walk, you can see a full album of all the photos I took over on imgur.

As mentioned last time, I believe I was dropped somewhere on the eastern side of the continent so I did the only thing I could do and start following the road away from the sea.

One thing that this walk convinced me of, which I suggested during my last one, was that, what it comes to roadside attractions, at least on the main roads, Zindra really does have more to look at. I can't and won't comment on the quality (when banished like this I tend not to blindly wander in and out of builds unless they're very obviously open to the public) but the quantity does seem fairly high.

Shops are, of course, very common, even shops that I know. I stumbled on one that I've shopped at before in the dim and distant past (at another location), although I wasn't so much in the market for more latex right at that moment. ;)

Animals also seem to be fairly common along the roadside.

I also stumbled on an interesting-looking building that I'll have to look at again when I'm in a position to actually read any notecards and the like. Obviously my name can't be in this database given that I couldn't read up on it.

Another thing I ran into a couple of times was missing sections of road. I wonder if there's some place you can report this to?

Roadside drunks also seemed to be a fairly common theme. I ran into this lady a few times:

And then there was the inevitable mash-up of animals and drinking:

The following location fascinated me, and made me feel a little sad too. A small shop by the side of the road with a "Grand Opening, Coming Soon" sign out front:

Inside was one free gift and one single vendor board with a t-shirt for sale. I inspected the "Coming Soon" sign and the prims appeared to date from 2010. Being denied names by the helmet I couldn't see who the owner was so couldn't be sure what the actual state of the shop was, but everything about it suggested it was someone's exciting pet project back in 2010 and.... it never went any further. I could be completely wrong, of course -- I hope I am -- but it made me think of all those failed projects, and made me happy that Z&A has actually lasted as long as it has.

Finally after a rather long walk, the road began to change. Lights and traffic control appeared. It looked like I might have made it to the edge of Kama City:

It became obvious that this was the case when I found the monorail and also found myself looking down onto the plain that the city is built on:

Pretty soon every bit of roadside land was built on.

Eventually I hit the sea again. I'd been following the same road all along, trying as best as possible to keep going in the same direction, so this appeared to be the western edge of the mainland of Zindra.

Having hit that point I decided to start randomly taking turnings and, pretty soon, I was back to a spot that I knew from my last visit to Kama City, the maps at the north west corner of the city:

From here on I had a good idea where I was and where I wanted to go. There's an island off the west coast of the mainland and I wanted to go and explore that.

Along the way I stumbled on what appeared to be an "outpost" of the Femdom Community in SL, an organisation that Z&A have been involved in a couple of times (being a sponsor of their events).

Eventually, on my route to the island, the road changed. It stopped being tarmac and turned into wood. This looked promising. I appeared to be on the right track.

Finally, I made it to the bridge over to the island, and what a cool bridge too! It's a swing bridge that you can control:

Eventually I stopped playing with the bridge and wandered over onto the island. One of the first things I saw was a very familiar form of transport, something that Mistress has owned since early 2010:

Without knowing that was where I was heading I'd stumbled on BWP:

Their shop and beach are really cool builds and, if you've never been there, you really should visit.

Walking a bit more I stumbled on a shop that obviously had fantastic taste in affiliate boards:

Eventually I made it was far west on the island as I could. From where I was stood it was nothing but a huge ocean of water between me and the next estate or mainland on the grid. This was also almost as far west as you can get on Zindra (I think you can get a little further west on the mianland itself if you go further south).

While wandering I stumbled on another "Grand Opening" sign. This time it wasn't quite so clear how old or recent it was. Another one for me to go back and have a look at I think.

Finally, as I was getting very close to the end of my 5 hours, I found something that was very new to me, and kind of odd. Not odd in a bad way, just.... odd. Here's the sign for the place:

And here's a poster explaining it:

An in-world memorial for someone who has passed in RL isn't that uncommon -- for a while I used to own some land just over the water from the grid's own memorial parks. The part that was unexpected, different and I found odd was this:

That, as far as I could tell, was the actual avatar of the person who had passed on. I had really mixed emotions about this. Again, I'll stress that it wasn't mixed emotions in any judgemental sense, it was more in a sense where I was taken aback by it. I've never seen something like this in-world before and the very idea of it had never even occurred to me before. I'd love to know more of the story behind it, how it came to be.

But that's for another day.

A few minutes later, as I wandered on, my helmet unlocked and it was time to head home again, my second period of banishment complete. It was, again, a fascinating experience. A longish period of forced separation from my shop, my workshop, my home and region is strangely liberating. As had as it is knowing I can't talk to anyone, can't take part in group chats, can't work on builds or anything like that, it's also almost reinvigorating to be forced to simply walk, reflect and observe.