Inventory loss poll

I just did a recent massive inventory clean out and am actually under 10k Items for the first time in ages, and I found things I didn't even remember buying, so I seriously doubt I'd notice if stuff disappeared. But I have never actually went looking for something and had it not be there.

The results of this survey seem in my uneducated opinion to possibly be a product of nonresponse bias. To wit, people who have had inventory problems in the past are, I imagine, very much more likely to respond to a poll like this than a person who hasn't had inv problems and perceives no basis for worry.

Not perceiving a basis for worry doesn't negate the worry of course. Also, I am not minimizing the frustrations of folks who have run up against this vexing problem. Apparently it can get hairy managing a terabyte-scale database with continual updates every second from across the grid. =/

Please don't forget all the people that don't read forums and all the people that are smart enough to be like "Ohh, 1/2 my shit is gone? Forget it, I'm outta here".



I don't lose inventory, the permissions on it just change to the point I can't use the item anymore. I really love when this happens on items I have entirely created myself. This problem started with 1.5 and hasn't gone away. Every update it happens to something new. Or sometimes you get lucky like last weekend, work on something all day, and have the pemissions reset while it is out in world and the Asset server is high on black tar heroin. I can't believe I am the only person with this issue. It hasn't been resolved, I think it is unlikely to be resolved, and now I don't even care anymore. I have created a work around of sorts, and when the day comes I lose something major and can't recover it myself, I will just log out and never come back. It is embarassing to think I have spent all the money on SL and the technical issues only seem to get worse, more random, and less likely to be resolved as time goes on.

Lately (last month or so) I have noticed a lot of Missing Images on clothing. The images will be completely gone from the database, so that even rebuying the item doesn't fix it. They're just... gone. I experienced this same problem a few months ago with 1 item, but eventually it showed back up, so I'm hoping that will happen again.

I am sure there are lots of folks that have quit without bothering to list all the reasons to LL. They dont have the staff to do it probably but it can be interesting from a marketing persepective to follow the "quitters" up and poll them as to their reasons. I'm sure they would learn a lot.

If my experience helps anyone, I have had two seperate large inventory losses, on the order of about 10,000 Lindens each time (luckily only stuff I bought, not made). Both happened a while ago though and before the asset server update.

I dont think anything usefull can be determined by this thread however unless we konw the state of the inventories when things went missing. Are these huge inventories with a thousand things all called "object" or are they neat, carefully organised inventories? In my case both losses happened between a crash and a re-log.

In those days if inventory was missing you just waited a couple of days and it usually came back, these were just two incidences when after several days, it didn't.

Blaming the end user is the kiss of death in IT and poor customer service in any other industry.


The tools we have for organizing and structuring our inventories are inadequate. Search has been a large improvement, but there is still a long way to go before inventory is as robust as it should be.


Since there is no way for a Resident to backup their own inventory for safety, they can not be held responsible for data loss, which falls upon LL alone.


Any suggestions for items neatly in a folder, all well labeled with proper permissions, ready to sell, created by the owner, that suddenly go no copy/no mod/no trans? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Whether the inventories are neat or jumbled, have 100 items or 25000 items, the fact that inventory loss is occuring across a wide spectrum of residents old and new is troubling. Regardless of the state of inventory, there is no defense for the loss of inventory. It is Linden Lab's responsibility to maintain the integrity of it.

I selected no only because I never noticed invetory loss. It may have happened and I just didnt notice I supose.

Maybe this is some "feature" we are unaware of that causes this. Items in SL are free to make copies of, and have no "wear and tear." Since everything can used forever, the economy would start to slow down. By making items "vanish" this forces people to rebuy items and helps keep the economy moving. Textures corrupting and becoming un-usable forces more money to leave the economy with the upload fee. I think we should be thanking LL for cause our items to be destroyed and forcing us to put money back into the economy.

Or maybe not. I know I have lost a few things. It always seems to be the old item that I never really used, but kept around. Then when I go to use it, I can't find it anywere. Sigh, such is SL I guess.

Re: Diane's comment.. My inventory is very neat and organized. Anyone looking at my inventory would probably think I had OCD. I don't think I have anything named Object at all. I have everything filed neatly away in folders and sub-folders, and I usually know exactly where something is when I want it. Even my Textures, of which there are oodles, have been renamed in groups. (I.E. 'Brick - Pewter' 'Brick - Fall Browns' etc.) I'm that anal about my Inventory.

And Re: Eboni's mention of the permission changes.. I've had things made by other people change perms in my Inventory, and my items change perms in theirs. Me and a few other creators & concerned residents spent a good long while hashing that out with Vektor a couple releases ago. I haven't noticed that happen recently (though I haven't really checked, come to think of it) but I have noticed quite a few things I created now list (nobody) as creator. These are not things that had more than 1 person work on them, or have been passed back and forth. These are things that have remained in my inventory. No idea why they would suddenly disown me.

"The world is a strange place to live in. All those cars. All going someplace. All carrying humans, which are carrying out their lives."

I lost a major portion of my inventory about a year ago. I venture to guess my loss exceeded $400,000 L worth of goods (that I had purchased)

Lost all the No Copy furniture in my furniture folder a few months back. Don't recall doing anything that might have triggered it, no nasty crashes! Just looked at my folder and noticed all my nice expensive stuff was gone. That day sucked. Tried getting a few things replaced, no one except one person responded and that in itself was a damn horrible experience.

I hadn't mentioned this as it is only effective lossage, but amusing nevertheless.

When I pulled up a build a year or so ago that had been lovingly landscaped by someone talented (i.e. not me) I boxed up all the landscaping into two boxes for oganizational sake.

Here's the funny part, I "own" these two boxes as I made them. I "own" all the contents of the boxes as had "purchased" them. However, the boxes somewhere along the line decided to become no-mod and I cannot extract the contents of them. Despite requests of a few Liaisons to re-permission the boxes so that I can get at the contents and their acknowledgement that they are able to do so, they have declined. Better still this dates to about a year ago when the population was much smaller, the Liaisons less overloaded, and my word about the provenance of the contents was unquestioned; they just didn't want to.

What a country!

It is their policy not to ever force permissions on things. If they did that they could probably get in hot water. You have to realize that Liaisons are peons. They have no authority. They need to act in accordance to the Upper Lindens' every whim.
Did you try mailing support / reporting it as a bug etc?

Yes, I know what their policy is and why it could potentially be problematic. Have you or anyone you know actually gotten a non-automated response from support@secondlife? It hasn't happened in my experience or in the experience of anyone I've spoken to.

I agree that they act as if peons, however I would contend that such is what we traditionally call "lack of empowerment" which is a considered a pretty bad sign in an organization the size of LL which means that no one has the capacity to make decisions for themselves. This is thought to be a Bad Thing as it essentially causes an organization of 50 good brains to act with the responsiveness of one. It also tends to set a companywide mentality of can't/won't do for fear of reprisal which is disasterous in a pure service organization. Finally, attitude like this is typically established by management as tone does truly "flow down".

One of the things that made me feel terribly as a live helper was to be asked/told to tell customers to mail to support@secondlife when I knew in all likelyhood that such would generate no response at all; I was thus careful to also include the URL for the phone lines which is the only means by which I've heard of real players to actually get a response (even if that response was "no".

I didn't mean for this to be a critique of organizational dynamics, but you asked these questions as if I were a noob who had no capacity to discern trends. As a very concrete example of one of the last LH calls I took before resigning, a player was owner of a historically significant build who very clearly intended to transfer to another player. The land was transferred, the contents were not, either through operator error or asset server failure to update ownership. After two calls to the "peons" (as you call them) trying to get LL to do the right thing in the case of the transferring player possibly never being able to be in game again, it took reportage of the incident on a third party site which was carried into the LL forums by an uninvolved party and the subsequent hue and cry of "shame on you LL" before someone woke up and took the initiative to do "right".

It really shouldn't be this hard.

I got it once and only once in the year and 1/2 I've been here, got the "asset cannot be found" or whatever it was message... Fortunately it wasn't anything too important, (One of the very first pieces of furniture I tried to make here) and I got past it. I feel very fortunate that this is the only problem of this type I've ran into, seeing how many other people have had more serious problems.