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.
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