Marketplace ads may not respect the maturity settings
closed
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Currently, when loading the Marketplace home page, no matter if logged in or not, the ads do not seem to respect any Maturity ratings, i.e. there wil be shown Adult items on the ads, even when the overall settings is set to General.
This creates a problem for the casual visitor who might not be aware that maturity can be changed — even those who are not logged in. Such visitors will judge the whole, vast content of the SL Marketplace by the few ads featuring very explicit clothing or devices, which, however, are prominent market leaders and can afford to run such ads all the time.
In particular, for those (like me!) engaged in getting schools, universities, non-profits and other organisations to get engaged in SL, a quick glance at the Marketplace will make them seriously question such a choice of a virtual world platform.
While Second Life, as a community, should be
proud
of its variety, and the healthy attitude towards adult/mature content — i.e., not "hide" it or pretend it doens't exist, but rather explain that SL embraces all, each on their own place, minding their own business — the reverse should also be respected: casual visitors may get a completely wrong impression of SL if all they can see is the sexually very
explicit content featured on those ads.I have no idea if the
ads
are rated themselves as G/M/A, or if the rating itself is inherited from the item
. In either case, I believe that LL should be more careful in what they show and to whom!But ads are not the only problematic thing. Even the list of "what customers are buying now" is not filtered at all by maturity rating. Attached is a typical example — I just launched a browser,
not
logged in, and visited the SL Marketplace right now. This is the first page I got (no, I didn't need to do any searches or special scrolling or refresh the page until I got something especially "nasty" — it was literally the very first page I saw).I've added a few doodles and arrows pointing out the problematic areas, if the SL Marketplace is shown to, say, a school teacher (or your grandmother). And, fortunately, the average mainstream person will not really know what "furries" are all about, much less what "Gor" means...
Note that my "red flags" do not represent at all my own stance on such items; I'm more than fine with them (and even worse ones). I'm just pointing out that
others
, having different expectations of what SL is supposed to be (because they might be impressed with the high quality of the promotional videos on the SL's home page), then suddenly turn to the SL Marketplace and get the shock of their lives...Log In
Sntax
closed
The Product Listings Enhancement feature (ads on marketplace) is working as intended. The items cited in the examples have a maturity rating of general. We will show adult maturity items in ads IF you have your maturity filter set to show it. If something is adult but has a maturity rating of general, please flag those items for review.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Sntax, thanks for looking into this. I admit that it's not easy to figure out what can be considered "moderate" and what is, indeed, merely "general". After reviewing the guidelines, it seems now clear to me that things can be pretty much "general" (and not violate LL's guidelines at all) while clearly they'd be labeled "Not Safe For Work" elsewhere. Still, on the example given, let's say that the "wet shine" body add-on is really pushing the guidelines to the edge: aye, when zooming in, I can see that the woman depicted in the image is technically
not
naked, since she's wearing a bikini
. It's just that the bikini is quite translucent
, just enough to slightly blur the nipples and genitals. So, technically speaking, these are not being "shown", but "blurred" (the whole image is blurred anyway), and therefore can be considered, uh, safely viewable by 13+ residents.Not that 13-year-olds cannot access porn everywhere these days; as said, I'm really not a prude person at all, and, for me, it's fine if people walk around naked on the streets and have sex in public shopping malls; so long as I'm not
forced
to do the same, I'm good :) That said, I'm well aware that my clients think very differently — both school educators and corporate environments are far more conservative and would rate most
content in SL as "adult" for sure.I do apologise for raising this issue in the first place, I would just love to keep SL a safe environment as far as possible, considering the possibility that some of the residents aren't of legal age and their parents/tutors might not fully agree with the very flexible interpretations/guidelines for each level of the maturity rating...
Robotshaz Resident
I wonder if people could report the inappropriate adult content on marketplace that is being shown in general because I had a mushroom aura once go from being general rated to moderate rated. It could be that some people just don't think to put the right ratings when listing products so you end up getting some adult content creeping into general and moderate.
xaka Chayoo
It is a good idea, although LL would have to create a MP cop force to check on every item at MP, not rely only on maturity rating, there are sellers that have perfectly innocuous text in their item presentation and than have the picture (texture) presented with the item with the "real" msg they are trying to convey. So, we should all be voluntary MP cops and report these occurrences, and then hopefully LL will have a maturity rating system that works, it can be done, it requires our collaboration though, and also would need an appeal system, mistakes can be made.