Horror Story

Just as a word of general warning to those lazychums who don't read official blogs like me....

This weekend i decided to sell my sim and returned all the objects by the land menu button 'Return all objects'. There were 1650 items on the island so i thought this would be a good way in order not to miss anything.

I waited for them to return. And waited. Nothing came back. (^.^);

I contacted Live Help. There was a Linden on, (forgot his name), who told me i should clear my cache. That would help!

So I did. And relogged. And waited.

As I was bored waiting I started to clear out my inventory. I decided to un-clutter my Lost and Found folder as I was expecting 1650 items (The plot thickens...).

But nothing happened. So I contacted Live Help again. Another Linden, way smarter this time, knew something of a bug and gave me a notecard. It had some info on a bug connected with no-mod items returned to your inventory, but not appearing there, and finally being corrupted or lost forever. At that moment I started to get nervous. Woah! A lot of my 1650 items were no-mod....would this mean they were gone forever? The notecard also mentioned you should wait at least a week before panicking :=) So I waited some more...

One day later, nothing was returned, so I panicked and got into Live Help again! This time, I got a REALLY smart Linden officer who told me the way objects are returned is changed: in fact....all your items are returned in ONE item, named...randomly. This was because of the dataserver (or something ^^) was too busy and LL had changed the way this works.

Sooo, my 1650 items were brought back into ONE item. At that point my heart stopped beating. I had been clearing and trashing my folders in waiting for the 1650 items. Frantically i began to pull out objects named "partylight' and 'object1' out of my inventory and trash-folder....and yes....there they were. In my anger...i asked the Linden employee how the heck i should have known about this. The answer was "I believe it was posted somewhere." /end conversation.

SO fellow residents! Beware if you return your stuff! And - don't - trash anything before you found it.

Oh, and also: when you rezz that object, everything is built back again exactly as you returned it. Nifty!? Not really. When you're in a sandbox, the items will hover over everyones' head. Plus, you need massive prims available to rezz that object.

Been there, done that,
~Kito

Could have been worse, I have a pond in my yard. I put fish in the pond last month, a few weeks later i was looking at the pond and my fish were gone, they had been returned, in the lost and found folder. So I put them back out. Next day, my fish were gone again... they weren't in lost and found this time. I've been in SL a long time and shit happens; the fish weren't expensive and I had other things to worry about. A week later, I get the return message and there they are... in my lost and found folder. Just be glad your stuff wasn't missing in limbo for a week.

The part I like about the story is that it took talking to 3, count them, THREE, Lindens before someone was able to tell you about this <sarcasm>well documented feature </sarcasm>.

we have been having a discussion about how LL has not advertised this feature change well enough. Feel free to stop over and add your thoughts.

/142/a8/147454/1.html

This blog post has the only good official explanation of the 'coalescing' feature that I've seen. It appears to more-or-less work now, but a few weeks ago when I sold 13,000 sq.m. of land I lost a few thousand $L worth of items that didn't make the trip to Lost and Found. I rezzed every object in Lost and Found and retrieved many of the items, but the rest are gone forever.

I haven't had that particular problem since, though, when returning objects.