Help! Auto return catastrophe.

After I inadvertently changed my land's "auto return" setting on February 8, the objects on my land which belonged to other people -- to a friend and also another avatar of mine -- disappeared. My friend reports that her objects are not in her Inventory. My avatar received the following email, but the objects he owns are not in his Inventory. Yes, "Lost and Found" has been inspected. Please help! This is a disaster for everyone involved. Thank you.

Here is the email which my other avatar received from SL after my mistake:

The object 'Second Life' has sent you a message from Second Life:
Your 53 objects have been returned to your inventory lost and found folder by Flieger Beresford near parcel 'Fliegersland' at Huntsbore 97.6748, 248.687 due to parcel auto return.

= Second Life is owned by Flieger Beresford
= Location unknown.

The object 'Second Life' has sent you a message from Second Life:
Your 20 objects have been returned to your inventory lost and found folder by Flieger Beresford near parcel 'Fliegersland' at Huntsbore 79.2959, 174.006 due to parcel auto return.

= Second Life is owned by Flieger Beresford
= Location unknown.

The object 'Second Life' has sent you a message from Second Life:
Your 23 objects have been returned to your inventory lost and found folder by Flieger Beresford near parcel 'Fliegersland' at Huntsbore 107.989, 198.085 due to parcel auto return.

= Second Life is owned by Flieger Beresford
= Location unknown.

The items are probably now 1, and to open it, find a open land and throw the item down (from lost and found folder). They can then pick up the prims that they want to separate from the rest.

i believe the '23 objects' will actually be returned as 1 object in your lost & found folder.
is there _anything_ in your lost and found folder? if so, try rezzing it.

Flieger - when multiple objects are auto-returned, they are combined into a single object in the Lost and Found folder. Have your friends go to a sandbox and rez the most recently returned object, then they can EDIT-TAKE each item back into their inventories.

It's happened to me a few times...............good luck !!

That's right.
The composite object will have a name taken from one of the objects in the collection.
A friend of mine had her entire house and art gallery returned as a "Female Sit"

yup...neat little feature that LL introduced about a year ago..called something like "Cascading cache".I absolutely hate it...didn't used to be that way.

~Lana Tomba

A friend of mine had this problem the end of last week. She knew to look for the composite, but it wasn't there. I am not sure if she ever figured it out. Last I had talked to her, she was getting ready to contact LL.

It is called "coalescence" - there is a blurb about it in the knowledge base. Land return always now returns objects as one or more coalesced objects, which are easy to see in inventory because the icon for them appears to be a small stack of boxes, instead of a single box.

It SHOULD appear in lost & found. However, the coalesced object is named the same thing as a randomly chosen object from those returned, and if that object happened to come from some other folder originally, in some cases the coalesced object has been known to show up in that other folder instead of in Lost and Found. (I don't know if this is a bug or what). So, if you don't see a coalesced object in Lost and Found, also look in folders that contained things that you think were returned. What a pain.

When you re-rez a coalesced object, all the stuff will appear in the same physical relationship to each other that they originally were. So you may want to rez the coalesced thing up in clear sky. If you already have an edit window open (ctrl-3), all of the objects will be selected automatically, so you can move them as a unit if you wish, or at least see them all highlighted!

Good luck!
.

TIPS
====

When rezzing coalessed (however ya spell it) items out of inventory, have your Build UI already up and in EDIT mode.

This will allow you to work with the entire group of objects as if they were one. For moving them, and, more importantly, seeing how many prims total they are so you know how many to pick up.

Additionally, all the prims will be highlighted in the edit-yellow-glow so you should be able to see the smaller ones if there are any.

I would also suggest looking for a place that has auto-return on, but allows build, in case you miss any items. Sandboxes usually do, but the auto-return is hours. I prefer a few minutes when doing things like this. Perhaps simply rezzing them on the property they were returned from orginally. At least you know it's friendly there

If it turns out to not be a coalessed item, then use the RECENT ITEMS inventory tab. There are filters in this tab to show since last login, last day, last 3 days, so it should at least show where the items are. They do not always go to Lost&Found. Sometimes returned items pop back in the folder they came from, or the folder that SL thinks they belong in (ie, prims to the Objects folder).

~Jessy

Thank you all very much! You've saved my life.

All who answered are very kind people.

Thanks again, and best wishes!

yea that's the word..i knew it started with a "C"

~Lana Tomba

Said friend My loss happened on the same date as yours Flieger and with the same scenario. Interesting coincidence.

Nope, never got any of it back. As of today, Lindens are just playing footsie with me and having me do more of the SAMO. I got a long email from them with many "tactics" try and none of them worked. They even told me to contact the makers of the objects and asked me to see if they would be so kind as to give them to me again free of charge. No such luck. Apparently, you only get a replacement if there was some problem when you made the purchase from the seller, not due to LL errors.

My only hope now, is that the Lindens will eventually reimburse me $L to cover the cost of repurchasing these objects. I'm only out maybe $1000-2000L in all, but it's a major annoyance since I can't quite tell what exactly is missing, other than 2 or 3 large objects which are very apparent.

Oh well!

You have always been able to "coalesce" multiple objects into a single object package yourself. The system is doing for you on auto-returned objects so that it will be easier for you to replace them. When you rez that coalesced object, all the pieces go back to their previous relative positions. This means you just go back to the land where they were returned, rez just one thing, and everthing is arranged the way it was before. (They're all selected, too, so if you need to adjust the position of the whole collection, you can do it all at once.)

Otherwise, you would have to rez 10 or 50 or 200 objects individually, figure out which "Object" is which, and manually place them where you wanted them, one by one. (And you like that idea better ?!?)

Sorry to say it but its highly unlikely the Lindens will reimburse anything, they specifically wrote the TOS to absolve them from all responsibility for losses like this.

Arch, first I want to thank you for giving me those Sandy Beach Islands a few weeks back. I was very remiss in doing so. They worked out very nicely for me

Now funny thing is, those were some of the things which got "lost" in my little disaster the other day! But thankfully, I had copies of that item in the inventory so no bid deal on that account.

As for the other objects - based on what you say, I suppose it's time for me to go shopping. Oh well, I was thinking I wanted a change in furniture anyway. Although one of the items was a canopy I had on my roof which was used mostly as an area to dance under. That, will have to be replaced. Good thing in RL dollars, we're only talking a couple of bucks. Not the end of the world