New Permissions Bug. CHECK YOUR ITEMS FOR SALE!

A concerned individual was kind enough to IM with the following message:

"umm i found a problem with some of your avatars on sale at Indigo sci fi supplies store you can take the body out of all the chacrters out of the contents folder i just thought you would want to know"

Upon investigating, I discovered that body shapes were just the tip of the iceburg. Somehow every single body part and item of clothing I have up for sale became checked "allow anyone to copy" and "share with group", along with about 50% of all objects. All affected items also now show as creator nobody. Needless to say I am not a happy camper right now.

I'd strongly adivse everyone to check your for sale items right away. We all know how much the last permissions bug hurt us. There are very few things that can happen in SL that can ever make me angry, and this one is at the very top of the list. I sincerely hope not too many people were affected this time around, but if you're in the same boat as me, please, please, please file a bug report, and reply to this thread. We need to let LL know as strongly as possible that something needs immediate repair.

Chosen, this is not a permissions "bug." However, it IS a common problem, and I've heard it dozens of times.

Bodyparts default to "Anyone Can Copy" as their permission set. Compounding the problem is the fact anyone can pull them out of a prim like this. Fortunately, you can fix it easily enough - just manually change the permissions.

So while you shouldn't worry about it happening randomly, this is one of those nagging problems that needs more public awareness.

If it is not a bug, then why do they show as "Creator Nobody"?

UPDATE - Curiouser and curiouser...

Upon further investigation, it appears that the issue is incredibly bizarre. Apparently, the problem was location-specific. Without exception, every item on the west side of my store was affected (both mine and Neuralclone's), while every item on the east side was immune. I didn't notice this at first because I only have 2 items on the east side; the rest are all Neural's.

Anyone care to speculate on a cause for this. Strangest thing I've ever seen.

Thanks for the input, Jeffry, but defaults are not the problem. The fact that half the prim objects ended up set the same way as the body parts and clothing is proof enough of this, along with the fact that I KNOW I didn't set them that way. And, as Blaze pointed out, defaults don't explain the creator nobody thing. A couple of things here and there were already creator nobody (I'd just been too lazy to fix them), but it was only a couple. Now it's all. Most of these items have been for sale for months, some well over a year, and this is the first time they've been like this.

Add in the completely baffling discovery that only items on one side of the store were affected, and that the items in question belong to 2 different authors, and there's a real mystery afoot here.

I've seen/heard of this several times now, and typically the problem has been with the default permission set not being changed out. In that vein, I've *also* heard of several earlier vendor bugs involving permissions and the "Creator Nobody" thing.

I'm going to take a shot in the dark here, but there's a good chance this is related to the inventory and DB problems that have been reported of late. It's possible, albeit a long shot, that the items were "restored" with defaults set.

As for the rest, I'd like to see more information before "only one side of [your] store" bears any relevance. When did it happen? What exact item types were affected? And what have you done to rememdy the situation?

I have no documented proof of this, but this is my observation.

Prior to the recent "move to a faster database" push, I had several animations in my inventory that other people would see and ask where I got them. I could pull up Properties and read them the creator's name.

Last night I opened Properties on one, and it said "Creator: Nobody".

Checked another. Same thing.

Checked another. It's fine, Creator has not been removed.

Nothing is tougher to chase down than an inconsistent, random bug. But I personally suspect the db move as the reason some items were reset and some weren't.

Good theory, although it doesn't explain the prim objects that were affected since "share with group" and "allow anyone to copy" are not the defaults for those.


I can't say exactly when it happened because it wouldn't normally occur to me to go around checking for this sort of thing. All I know is a concientous customer IM'ed me last night, just as I said, and I logged in to investigate as soon as I got the E-mail. What I can say is I rearranged the store about 2 weeks ago, so unless by some amazing coincidence, I happened to put all the already bugged items on one side, it must have happened some time in the last 2 weeks. Also, one of the affected items was fairly new, added about the same time as the rearangement, so that's further evidence of the time frame. Another item of the exact same age on the other side of the store was not affected.


As I said, it was every body part and artical of clothing (on the west side of the store), and about half the objects. Only items inside boxes were affected, not the boxes themelves. I didn't check if any items inside boxes inside vendors had changed since no one can take items out of those boxes. None of the boxes in the vendors had been affected though.

None of the prim objects affected turned "creator nobody", just the body parts and clothing. Everything affected turned "share with group" and "allow anyone to copy", including the prim objects.

If it matters, the prim objects I'm talking about are all av attachments.


I spent a while last night in emergency cleanup mode, changing all the perms back to normal. I'm going to have to replace all the creator-nobody items, but I haven't done it yet. Beyond that, all I could do was file a bug report, and post a warning here in case anyone else was hit, both of which I did.

In retrospect, I wish I had duplicated the affected items, both for evidentiary purposes, and for experimentation. It would have been interesting to have seen what perms the duplicates would have ended up with. I'm wondering if it would have been something akin to the unlinkable prims and the mysteriously intangible yet not phantom prims we've all been seeing lately, both of which can be fixed by duplication.