Coalesce feature??? Has this been advertised somewhere prominently??

Im an estate manager on an island. The other day I do a mass return of items to clear the land. Well, out of many items, I get back like FIVE. And these items appear to be random wall boards named object. I toss em and go digging through inventory for my missing items. I contact a Linden who happens to be online. Per her instructions, I dump cache and reboot. Nothing. So I dump the trash, poke around some more. Then I try a different Linden who tosses me a notecard:
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How to find "Lost Inventories" due to the new Coalesce feature

In a feature release a couple of weeks ago, we incorporated a new feature to help with load on our databases when Residents return objects from parcels. As before, lost objects can be found in the Lost & Found folder, but there is a change in how they are displayed. When objects are returned to this folder, they will be coalesced into one or more of the returned objects.

The way it works is that the system randomly selects one of your returning objects as the item to be bundled with, hence the word "coalesce". This one object is actually a combination of all of the other returned objects from the same area. When you rez that object inworld from your L&F folder, it will rez all of your coalesced items in the same formation it was last placed inworld before having been returned to you. If your items are being returned from various areas in a sim, you may receive several of your returned objects in your L&F folder. Again, each these will be bundled with rest of your returned items. This will only happen when multiple objects are returned at the same time from the same parcel or region
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Well, thats cool and different. And I did find some of the items attached to something else that did appear in my inventory. But Im still missing a bunch of stuff, and its quite possible they were attached to one of those wall pieces I DUMPED!! So my issue is this,
Why wasnt this feature advertised prominently somewhere?? So I had some warning before I hit trash purge! My ignorance on the subject has most likely cost me some big bucks and a few items that I bought years ago and have no clue where to find again. For such a major change in the way things are returned to inventory, I would have hoped Id have been given a heads up.

I had something similar happen, but when I pulled "object" out of my inventory to see if I could salvage at least *part* of what I had lost (which was every damned thing on my land that day due to grid attack), it turned out that "object" was a little over half of my house.


I never saw this mentioned in any sort of official way until just now. I just happened to be desperate enough to pull "object" out of my inv that day.

Yes, I too lost some items due to this feature. Like you I deleted some random object from lost and found, not knowing other items were "coalesced" into it. IMHO they haven't done much to get the word out about this new feature. It would be nice if they sent an IM to you upon having items returned that they could be coalesced.

Yeah, no kidding. This feature is ridiculous. What's wrong with them all going into my lost and found?

Stupid feature imho, unless it's well documented, or they name the object "object (coalesced)". At least something!

REturn all your items from a specific SIM, and try to REzz THOSE items again, your items are placed back in position in about the same relative position to each other soo be VERY careful and do some manual cleanup of your things, before doing a return.

Request a rollback to before you did the cleanup to get your items back.

Also you can enter Edit mode (control-3) before putting coalesced objects out to more easily control them.

feature by accident when we were switching land to a new group last week, and the lag was so bad we coundnt move fast enuff, and prims started going back like mad. Found alot of our stuff "clumped" to one object in lost and found. First time that ever happened and was stumped as to why it had. Figured it was another bug..shrugs

If this feature must stay, perhaps the coalesced object could be given a name which will help us identify it ... such as:

195 Coalesced Objects Returned from <location> on <date/time>

Torley has indicated that it wil at least show that they're coalesced the way they show permissions or worn status. Eg: maybe "Wall Segment (coalesced)" though I'd prefer "Wall Segment (coalesced, 195 objects)".

I'd like to see (returned from Noonkkot (12,12) at 14:10:22 2006-11-10) on *every* returned object, coalesced or not, now you mention it.

Or perhaps that could be put inthe properties of the coalesced object (description, acquired)?

That'd be more work for the return to do I think, so not the best.
But yes, a minimum of adding "coalesced)" or a coalesced bit (which would be faster to process in extreme load) that can be used to mark a coalesced package. Or hell, a special coalesced object, rather than putting them into another object (which is confusing an IMO stupid).

Why can't LL run more changes and ideas by us first before deciding they know best and implementing it however they want without giving a damn what we think?

The changes I'm talking about would only need to happen in the inventory editor when it displays the coalesced pseudo-object. I'm not talking about actually changing the name or properties of any of the objects inside it.

I'm sure the FIC were informed

To have the coallesced object say where it was returned from? That would require that info to be put into the coallesced object when it's returned, because once it's in your inventory it has no location information. For every coallesced 'group' that's more and more overhead, when the issue is about saving resources during mass returns I'm not sure about adding more work.

yeah, this is something they deginitely should have advertises.

it has its good and bad sides. good side- if youre a renter and get your things returned then re rent right away you can put them all down in position at once, very fast.

some bad things are that if you get your things returned and it was a lot of things, you usually have to go somewhere large to rez it, then pick up each thing seperately- thats a hassle

Yes, that would require the information be put into the coalesced object when it's returned. So?

They're already putting information into the coalesced object when it's returned (the fact that it's coalesced), and they already have the location it was returned from, so the only overhead is writing two columns in the same row of the database instead of one.

It was mentioned, but only peripherally, here.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/11/06/getting-technical-auto-return-time-increase/#more-489

> Object returns are also coalesced, or clumped together, to reduce their performance
> impact.

It was mentioned briefly in that blog post, but it was in the context of 'goo damage control' and not as a generalised description of a new way they were handling basic mass inventory returns by parcel management. Reading that blog memo wouldnt have clued me in that that I would expect my items to be returned in coelesced form when performing housekeeping. Doubt many people would have read that much into it, or thought ahead that LL would be using this method for general use. If you read the 138 responses to that blog post you will find one person addresses the coelesce feature briefly, and the only other response to mention it simply states " …and I still HATE the coalesce feature"