Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Originally published on my Patreon

Last Friday I got an an official statement from Linden Lab on a subscription problem that impacted many SL merchants on Marketplace:

At this time, affected Residents and merchants should be fully refunded for L$ charges on any erroneous transactions related to Wednesday's outage with our service provider. We apologize for the frustration and thank everyone for their patience. As always, the best place to get updates about such situations is on our status blog.

If you're wondering what that is, or if you were affected, read on for details, originally published on August 7th here:

I've gotten multiple reports of SL Marketplace subscription overcharges which have hit many SL brands with thousands of extra L$ charges in the hundreds of thousands of Linden Dollars. (Some background here, plus an explanation of what happened at the end of this post.) Linden Lab is already looking into this apparent bug, with product head Grumpity Linden on the company feedback site promising brands affected that actions are being taken "to make you whole". I've reached out to the company for an update.

Until then, it's highly recommended that you check your SL account, go to the transaction history, set it back as far as possible, and then enter "MKT2 subscription" in search, and check for any overcharge. Also check your transaction history for any sudden drop of Lindens in the past 3 weeks.

Hat tip: Axl Truth mesh artist and SL merchant, for the tip and the advice above. He also sent along a simplified explanation of what's happening:

Basically think of it this way:

You want your socks to be on Marketplace. Linden Lab offers for a certain amount of Lindens per week to make your socks appear in the front page of recommended items or on the end of the purchase page. And that increases visibility of your items.

If you have 10 listing on an ad that's like L$1000×10 = 10,000. (These are napkin numbers.)

Now Linden Lab had a bug where they charged the same item multiples times. So instead of being 10K L$, it ended up being 50K L$. Because each item was charged 5 times for the service rendered once.

So when you go to your listing, it shows sock advertising five times instead of one, and 5K Linden paid instead of 1K.