MANY WEEKS AGO:

Amazon: Hey, you need to get your titles down to 200 characters by [deadline].

Me: Yeah, OK. I'll work on this.

Amazon: You need to get your titles down to 200 characters by [deadline] or we'll have our very stupid and broken AI do it for you.

Me: Yes, OK, I said I'll work on this. I can't get this done in 12 seconds.

Amazon: Here are our proposed AI titles. You have 12.6 seconds to review every single listing or we'll implement these titles.

Me: NO! Dear god no! These are terrible. I will drop everything for three days and do this now.

Amazon: Are you done yet? It's been 13 whole seconds and this is VERY important.

Me: Can't I have three days?

Amazon: We needed this done last month.

Me: You never said that!

Amazon: We needed this done last month.

Me: <work work work> OK, here are the corrected, compliant titles.

Amazon: Thanks, we'll use these.

FOUR WEEKS LATER:

Amazon: Hey, remember when we made you use very many hours of your valuable time to re-title your listings to under 200 characters? Well, we have great news: Now you have to cut it down to 75. Congratulations!

Me: Wait, what?

Amazon: Yeah, but once you do that you can have the other 125 characters back in a non-title field.

Me: But that's worse. You see how that's worse, right?

Amazon: This is definitely better. You still have 200 characters! Congratulations!

Me: Why not have 10 fields of 20 characters? Or 20 fields of 10 characters? Heck, let's just have 200 fields of one character each. That's still 200 characters, so it must be just as good! <eyeroll>

Amazon: Look, just follow the new rules.

NEW RULES: You can't use these specific special characters.

Me: Hmm, I don't see colon or semicolon in the list of forbidden characters. I will use them. And I learned my lesson from last time: I'll be working on these progressively as I can carve out time.

Amazon: Don't forget to retitle your listings! Follow the rules!

Me: OK, let's try these few.

Amazon: Cool. Nice work.

Me: OK, let's do some more like that.

Amazon: Cool. Nice work.

Me: OK, now a few more.

Amazon rep 1: Hey, you have semicolons.

Me: Yeah, it's not a forbidden character.

Amazon rep 1: But it is unless you're using it grammatically correctly as a separator.

Me: That's exactly how I'm using it. I used it in all those others, too.

Amazon rep 1: Ah, I see. That should be OK then. I'll check.

Me: Darn right.

Amazon rep 2: Hey you have semicolons, and they need to go.

Me: I was told they were OK in this context. And they weren't flagged earlier.

Amazon rep 2: *ahem* I said, you have semicolons, and they need to go.

Me: Grrr. OK, I'll take out the semicolons. But there are too many commas this way; this badly messes up lists. Colons aren't forbidden, so I'll keep those and use them with commas more strategically. Time to yet again rework all of these titles.

Amazon: We've reviewed your recent changes and some of your new titles are missing item_form.

Me: Yeah, so?

Amazon: They're missing item_form.

Me: So what? That's not listed as a required part of the title.

Amazon: Oh, but it is.

Me: No, it's very much not.

Amazon: OK, no, it's not, but we meant it to be, at least for you.

Me: This is completely out of the blue. What's the rationale for this change?

Amazon: It's not a change! It was just never mentioned anywhere before just now. Some customers filter products by item_form.

Me: But item_form is in the attributes and is shown elsewhere on the detail page. Your filters should just check those attributes.

Amazon: But what if you didn't fill out that attribute, huhhhh?

Me: You force sellers to fill out attributes all the time, including irrelevant or misleading ones. I know this from experience. Just require that attribute field to be filled.

Amazon: Oh, it is, but it's now required to be in the title, too, for extra super duper superfluous repeated backup redundancy. We are really doing you a favor here. Congratulations!

Me: You're kidding, right? 75 characters total, we must include the brand name, we must include item_form, and we're still supposed to fit useful titles into what's left?

Amazon: You have the Item Highlights, you see.

Me: Then let me put the item_form in the Item Highlights field.

Amazon: BAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA No.

Me: So a large percentage of the characters in the title proper will be information that doesn't clearly distinguish to the buyer what the item actually is, because you require them to be there as clutter.

Amazon: Now you're getting it. This is why we have rules!

Me: So I have to go through and re-re-re-re-do these titles because you keep changing the rules.

Amazon: Of course not. We can use AI to wreck your titles for you. And we totally never changed the rules.

Me: I mean, if you didn't change the rules, then your communication of them was, um, lacking. There are more accurate words to use there but they're often frowned upon when used in mixed company.

Amazon: We haven't changed the rules, and the rules are simple: 75 characters, brand name, product name, size/count, item_form, no special characters like pipes, semicolons, and colons.

Me: No colons?! Since when? That's NEVER been listed as a forbidden character! None of your previous complaints or reports flagged my titles that contain colons!

Amazon: Well we're flagging them now. Look, just because we never said before six seconds ago that you can't use colons doesn't mean you can use colons. That doesn't change based on the pesky fact that we deemed colons entirely acceptable during reviews multiple times earlier in this process. I don't understand why you are having such trouble following the rules...