A warning for those using vending machines

Not to cause undue alarm, but in the interest of keeping additional items from inadvertantly being distributed without permission, I figured I should post this. I discovered today that the problem with permissions changing on an item inside of a vending machine still exists, but is very difficult to reproduce. When Philip Linden came to my store to diagnose the problem a few weeks ago, I went over all the permissions then with him. Since then, one of the machines has had a single item out of 37 in the machine change to copy permissions. This problem has occured over time at various locations, in different machines, and has been impossible to predictably reproduce. It is being investigated as to why this is occuring, but to be on the safe side, you should check your own machines to make sure it is not happening.

The easiest way to quickly check the permissions of every item in a vending machine is to mark the vending machine to sell contents (put in a high price so someone doesn't come along and buy the machine while you are doing this), then choose Buy (it will be under More on your pie menu instead of in the normal place, since you are buying from yourself). The dialog box that comes up to confirm the contents shows all of the permissions so that you can quickly check them. Don't forget to turn off selling contents once you are finished.

Whack A Mole!!! Thanks for pointing this out Cris! I'm about to take all my items out of vendors and just go with the boxes save for a small handful that will all go inside one vendor where I will be setting the contents to like $10Lindens. I'm just mainly finding dealing with vendors to be a pain right now (even though they are much needed since the dawn of 1.2). So I'm going to ride out the storm with "sell contents" boxes in the meantime.

Anyway, thank you again for the heads up!

PS: I have no idea why I let my brain spew out "Whack A Mole" to my fingers there?! *shrug*

Is this a problem specific to one brand of vending machine, or all of them?

I currently use moopf's.

It appears to have nothing to do with the vending machine itself - it seems to be a bug in the way permissions in the contents of an item are handled. It is not vending machine type specific - I have had it occur in machines made by two different people. We cannot set permissions on items programmatically, so it has nothing to do with the scripts in the vending machines.

thank you cris. checking them all now.

I was wondering that myself, you wackadoo.

UMPOSSIBLE!! That was a one time bug and it was FIXED never to happen again!

Seriously though, thank you Christiano. After I am over my crying spell I will have to go check my boxes.

Don't change anything too fast Pen... Asri and I use boxes/prims to sell our shoes in and the same thing happen to us yesterday, I spoke to Philip and Phoenix and they are looking into it... no idea what is causing this

TIP: What you CAN do to prevent this, is to use a remote vendor system.

I use Raphael Rutherford's system, and none of my vendors in world (+250) actually contain any items. They are all on the servers (one server for each different vendor), which I have hidden away in a remote sim. It still isnt fool-proof, but reduces the risk. Actually, I think I'll hide them even better now that I know about this.

This tip is, of course, to no use for merchants that are using live demos of their products, like animations and rezzed models. This certainly should be a priority fix for LL!

Another great thing about a remote system is that I can just stuff a new item into the server, and say 'update', and all vendors in-world will be able to show and sell the new item. I save a lot of time when i dont have to fly around to 40 malls to update my vendors. Plus, i get daily sales report that i can quickly browse to see if a mall spot is profitable or not before renewing rent.

Moonshine,

As Sensual just pointed out, it has nothing to do specifically with a vending machine - it has to do with some type of bug in the handling of permissions inside of another object. Your remote vending machine system still puts items inside the inventory of your vending machines, and it has a centralized object server which handles transferring items to the vending machines to keep them in sync. Both the vending machines and the original server are at risk for this problem. Any object that stores items inside of it could potentially have this problem, so just pay attention to the permissions. It is not widespread, and it generally only occurs on one item at a time (as I said in my original post, 36 of 37 items inside the vendor were unaffected), but it does happen. A remote vending machine system does nothing to prevent this problem.

No, it doesnt. My vending machines only contains scripts and a notecard with the key of the server that handles it.

The point is your itens are IN another object. You aren't any safer then we are.

Feel free to find my items...

No one has to FIND them, no one has to do anything to them, it is a bug, not an exploit...

My point was the the risk is greatly reduced, since my items are not visible in the content of the vending machines. But, never mind. some people simply won't understand. Im done with this thread.

Moonshine,

The items are being served from a centralized server object that has items in it. The permissions on an object inside of there could potentially change. The item would then be sent to the user upon purchase at one of your machines. If you are indignant about it, fine, but I don't want other people to have the false illusion that a certain thing prevents it. They do not know the cause of the bug, and it does occur - there are all kinds of tangible examples of it. If you are not worried about your own items, that is fine. However, I would not like to see any of your work inadvertantly stolen.

It has nothing to do with the visibility of your items.

some people simply won't understand.

Thank You Cristiano!

Well I guess I'll be busy for oh about the next week. LOL

P

putting in boxes is fine if you dont have over 200+ items and not the prim usage...
Also, if its happening to any item in another item and boxes are affected as well, its us sellers getting the brunt of it all from customers.
Its not easy for us, having to keep putting up with stupid bugs and then we are the ones moaned at, i say my items are mod and people arent buying with mod and no way i can sell as it is, cause I simply would never have the prim allowance for it.
*sigh* shuts up now lol

~pokes the lindens to finish makeing that llGetInventoryPermMask() command~

Nothing to do with this thread (sorry) but I just wanted to say I love Christiano's sonic the hedgehog pic hehe.

probably very similar to some bugs we've seen... heres a question cristiano.. when your item appears full permission to someone.. by default does the *NEXT* owner permission *they* see appear as no copy? (aka does it look like *THEY* were the ones who set the no copy bit by default?, thats aparantly been happening a few times that we've seen with various different permissions, both things vended, and direct inventory given.

aka you're given a no copy object, but then when you use it it turns out you get full perms and its set *NEXT* person no copy, like they somehow get the permissions *you* were supposed to have had on the item, not the permissions they were supposed to have

i've seen the inverse too. where permissions you set for the next person, can revert to you, if you rez things directly out of an objects inventory...

overall theres still alot of strangeness and cruft in the permissions system thats prolly gonna take some time to work all out