jackiewallace Resident I understand your concern, but the suggestion wouldn’t take control away from creators. It would just make the keywords which they already input transparent. This could actually reduce unfair flagging by helping shoppers see what terms were used before reporting, instead of guessing blindly. It could protect creators from false assumptions, not expose them to more of them.

Polyhistor Serpente The keywords used on the Marketplace are nothing more than search optimization. You can’t see that in a Google ad either. What would be much more important is to fully separate demo products from full versions during searches. Let’s introduce rules for customer safety: if a creator becomes unreachable to their customers for an extended period of time, they should permanently and irreversibly lose their right to use the Marketplace.

jackiewallace Resident I appreciate your perspective, but I think we may be talking about slightly different things here. This suggestion isn’t about limiting creators but is instead about making the keywords they already input visible to shoppers. That way, users can better understand why a listing appeared in their search and avoid false flagging or making assumptions.

Comparing it to Google ads isn’t quite the same, since the SL Marketplace is a community facing shopping platform, not a closed corporate ad system. Shoppers rely on keywords to find products that actually work for their avatars and when results are cluttered with unrelated listings it becomes frustrating for them and unfair to creators who tag responsibly.

While unrelated to keyword visibility, I did want to clarify something you mentioned. Separating demos from full products is already a feature built into the Marketplace. After running a search, look on the left side of the page under the categories. There’s a checkbox labeled "Demo Items" that you can tick on or off, and then click "Refine search" to apply the filter.

Ultimately, this idea is about improving clarity and reducing confusion for both shoppers and sellers. It isn’t taking control away from anyone.

Polyhistor Serpente If my previous wording wasn’t entirely clear, it may be because I intentionally chose not to express my point in overly rigid terms. I believe it’s important to separate two aspects of this discussion.

On one hand, we have the creator - the seller - who owns the rights to the content they produce. This includes not just the product itself, but also the images, the description, and the keywords they carefully choose. All of these elements are protected under copyright. On the other hand, we have the buyer - the user - who is browsing the Marketplace to find products.

From a strictly technical and legal perspective, there’s no inherent reason why a buyer should have access to the internal marketing strategy of a creator. In fact, keyword data shouldn’t even be visible in the source code. Revealing this information could open the door for malicious users to misuse it, whether by targeting sellers for harassment or by exploiting their work in a competitive context.

This is a marketplace, and like any marketplace, competition exists. Keyword strategies are part of how creators position themselves, and giving everyone access to those strategies could unfairly strip away the advantage of those who have taken the time to think critically and act strategically.

Transparency is valuable - but only to a point. We shouldn’t pursue it so far that it begins to penalize competence and creativity. Some parts of the system should remain behind the scenes to preserve fairness and protect the efforts of creators who act responsibly.

Your store has four products, all of which are windlight settings. So in reality, you’re selling know-how based on system-provided configurations, the copyrights of which you only partially own, as under copyright law they are considered derivative or compiled works. Consequently, you don’t actually have any 100% original product listed on the Marketplace - at least not at the time I checked your profile. I know this might not make me very popular with you, but I believe professional consultations about Marketplace matters should be left to actual creators.

jackiewallace Resident Keywords are not copyright protected.. They are words. The rampant keyword abuse is whats being discussed here. When I search for something i use 'Shirt AND Jake' for example. Why do hundreds of dresses, hairs, vehicles, weapons and the like show up? Because lazy merchants batch edit all of their items with the same keywords.

With the keywords showing it would give the ability to report items for keyword spam accurately, instead of it being a MP glitch (which has happened)

ETA, your last paragraph is just nasty.. You only have 23 items in your store. Perhaps you should leave the professional consultations to actual creators.

jackiewallace Resident Customer Safety? What do you mean? Like how is them being unreachable putting the customer in an unsafe situation? All she is wanting is more transparency from the creator.

jackiewallace Resident I mean unless you are scared that you would be realized for abusing the tag system and it would hurt your store.

Sammy Huntsman What will the next request be? Maybe to make the source code of every script mandatory to be public for everyone? Let’s make something clear. Transparency hasn’t been a thing in Second Life for a long time, and it’s systemic. Just think about the fact that if I have to report someone because they committed some kind of offense against me, I never get any official feedback afterwards - whether it was investigated, what the result was, and what sanctions were taken against the reported user. Keywords as such could even be abolished, since any product can be found through the words in its description anyway, and it’s up to the creator how they word the description and presentation of their product.

Sammy Huntsman Let's see ... there are the tags. I have no idea what is the problem here. You can see what Legacy is using for keywords: catwa, lelutka, reborn, ebody. If we look at it strictly, this demo product has keywords that have nothing to do with the product itself; the goal is that if someone searches for a mesh body with the keyword "Reborn", Legacy will also be found as a result. However, what marketing strategy a particular creator uses on the internet is none of the buyer’s business. Likewise, for websites you cannot dictate what keyword variables the <meta name="keywords"> may contain, which are processed by various search bots.

jackiewallace Resident the point is transparency, I mean you have access to those tags. But why does the consumer not have that same access? It's very similar to the Steam dilemma, where you have people actively saying it's not necessary for Steam creators to tag the fact that their games were made with AI. Due to their logic of games nowadays are mainly AI. But on the transparency camp, people are like we want to know. As it gives us the ability to know if we want to buy it or not. The key to this issue, is that if we could see the tags. We as a consumer, could easily determine if things are set right. As someone previously said, that you do find items that make no sense to it being there. That also being said, with making marketplace keywords visible. Howabout making it so creators have to put on their item listing, if it uses AI and how much AI was used in it.

Sammy Huntsman I think that in this case you are completely mixing things up, and it’s clear that your technical knowledge is not sufficient to hold a position on this topic. I suggest we leave this to the professionals…

KyleWForrester Resident Totally fair to be wary of false flagging, many of us are. That is actually why showing keywords would help, if people can see what was used then there’s less confusion and guessing. This would generate fewer mistaken reports for honest creators.

Right now, most people (other than those that knew the work around I saw in another comment) are flagging based on search results alone, with no clue if the tags might have even caused them.

Polyhistor Serpente OH NO....he flagged My stuff intentionally.

KyleWForrester Resident People who want to maliciously abuse the flagging system will likely do it with or without visible keywords. Honestly, they’ll even feel more confident doing it when keywords are hidden because they won't have something immediately in front of them proving that they are making a poor choice.

Making keywords visible would actually discourage bad faith flagging, prevent mistaken flagging, and truly honest creators are given a chance to defend their listings with transparency before it is even flagged.

KyleWForrester Resident I fail to see how making the tags visible would make this a problem; anyone seeing the tags will be able to see that the flag is bogus, unless the creator is indeed abusing the tags for discoverability, in which case, tough luck, buddy.