On Monday November 11th, Linden Lab issued a Commerce blog post indicating that there were changing the requirements which much be met in order to sell goods via the Second Life Marketplace.

The move, clearly aimed at preventing the ease with which suspect accounts can create a Marketplace presence and start selling goods which may have been ripped from elsewhere was announced thus:

To increase security for Merchants and shoppers alike, all new Second Life Marketplace Merchant accounts will be required to enter payment information on file (PIOF). If you would like to check your account to see if this requirement has been met, please see the Mesh Upload Status page.

Only newly created accounts will be required to meet this requirement at this time, and existing Merchant accounts will not be affected. However, we strongly recommend that all merchants complete the steps necessary to meet this new requirement.

If you have difficulties completing these steps, please file a support ticket or file a JIRA.

Unfortunately, the announcement was immediately followed by confusion and negative feedback, largely as a result of the system not appearing to work as advertised, and being relatively easy to circumvent.

I contacted Peter Gray, the Lab’s Director of Global Communications about the announcement and confusion, and received the following reply:

Hi Inara,

Thanks for your email. We’ll be adding the below to the blog post on this topic momentarily:

Thanks to reports from Merchants, we have discovered a bug in the system that determines whether an account has payment info on file. We are working now to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and expect to release a fix in the next couple of weeks. In addition, we have had some questions about the 5-day age requirement for accounts trying to become Merchant accounts. This requirement is not new, and there are no current plans to change it.



best, Peter This update has now been appended to the original blog post, and will hopefully help alleviate immdediate concerns, although it may also lead to further questions as to why the update was not more thoroughly tested.