Classifieds go on deleting!

This message concerning deletion of auto renew classifieds was posted some time in February:

James Linden
Linden Lab Developer

I believe I have found an fixed this problem. Occasionally our process that renews classifieds would run at the same time as the one that deletes expired classifieds, causing random deletions.

Classifieds that expired today might still be affected, but starting tomorrow night things should be correct.

Sorry about that, folks. We have to run lots of database cleanup scripts in parallel these days because we have so much data to clean that doing it all sequentially would take over 24 hours to do one day's worth of cleanup.

James


Clearly this problem of deleted 'auto-renew' classifieds has not been fixed because all 5 of my auto renew clasifieds have now been deleted along with countless others. And it has nothing to do with alphanumeric characters...ahhhhhhhh! this is so annoying now!

urgh yes i have still been replacing classifieds this past weekend its not fixed keep putting in bug reports and ask for your classifieds money back

I just checked mine and sure enough two (out of four) had vanished. After two days without any sales, I realized something was wrong. Will have to make it part of my morning routines, log on to SL, check my profile, replace missing classifieds.

The first 2 or 3 times I just accepted it and moved on. Now it's starting to get really annoying - especially now that I can see how important they actually are.

-Atashi

Yeah, James Linden is talking out of his arse. Nearly all of my classifieds have not auto renewed for the last 2 weeks. ive found it is only the newly created ones that dont auto renew (created within the last month) Ads that have been up and auto renewing for months before this issue are still renewing. I advise anyone with an ad to check on the day of renewel just to make sure!.

Hm, thanks for that tip. I was actually thinking of changing my ad tonight, but nevermind that.

Nope, not mine. :\ All of my classifieds, including ones I've had up for MONTHS, are gone except one... and I expect that one to disappear soon as well. *sigh* I placed some of them so long ago that I can't even remember all of them... what a pain in the arse.

Last night I was wondering about the quiet around my shop and thought to check the Classifieds, and sure enough, mine was gone again.

A few days ago I had gotten a $50 refund for the last time this happened, and I thought it was pretty cool that they had managed to do that.

Little did I know they had erased my classified again, too. This is the same classified I have had forever, and I always put it on auto-renew. They keep erasing it.

I'm going to have to check to make sure it is up every single day.

coco

Same here, an ad I've had for months got deleted.

Keep your images and text in RL files!

I copied mine out into a text document after I was first alerted to this (unluckily not quickly enough to save one of them, but that one was due to be replaced at the end of the month anyway).

Checked last night and the rest had all gone. Don't know when that happened but certainly within the last few days. What a nightmare.

When do classified ad payments go out? I'd like to check my transactions and see if I'm still getting charged. I am, at least, relieved that I never joined the price race (pay L$50 for all mine) but feel for those who might be losing a lot more than that.

Traffic to my store, which has been pretty steady since I opened, has bottomed out over the last few days. Between lag and the vaporizing classifieds, nobody is even dropping by, much less shopping.

Sigh.

I went through my own transaction history and (fortunately) I was not charged for the classifieds that vanished. It looks like they charge you on the day they repeat... so in my case, I listed them on a Sunday, so when they repeated successfully I was charged on the subsequent Sundays. The two that vanished, I wasn't charged for. I've re-listed them today and - if they manage to not get deleted - I expect to be charged for them again next Tuesday.

It really is infuriating though that this is still happening. I do keep the text copied on my own computer so it's just a matter of copy and pasting but that isn't the point. It's little things like this that really irk me... these are the things that make SL less of a fun hobby and more of a chore or job that puts 'demands' on my time.

-Atashi

They are still being deleted... one of mine was set to renew today... went to check on it and it was gone.

At least I wasn't charged for the renew.

Has anyone noticed - do they just vanish on 'renewal day', or are they getting deleted just any old time?

I checked this morning and mine are still there, for now... but I'm wondering if they'll vanish on the day they are supposed to renew.

It seems like such a crazy little bug, or actually sounds like two bugs.. some folks' ads get deleted, but they don't get charged, other folks do get charged then the ad is deleted anyways.

Maybe the program that goes around deleting expired ads should have a line of code added that says 'if the renew button is checked don't delete this regardless of any thing else'... that way even if the renew and delete programs are running simultaneously, the delete one simply won't react to ads with auto-renew checked.

-Atashi

I love how they never *really* know what they`re doing.

Cute.

This is the reality of ALL computer programming. You change one code block, but somewhere in the deep bowels of the application, someone else has written another block of code that interacts with yours in ways that you can't even begin to predict until your "fix" doesn't fix the problem.

So then you go on a code hunt through hundred or thousands or millions of line of code trying to think of every conceivable circumstance that might have led another programmer to write a code block that inadvertently breaks that function.

No one person can write, much less remember, every line of code written for a complicated application. And SL is as complicated as it gets. So any attempts to change things are fraught with peril.

All good and true, but I think these are update queries running on a schedule against an SQL database.. or something similar to this, external from the simulator software itself.. So it ought to be easier to track down and fix than actually having to debug alot of code. There's no source code to be looked at in this case. Your same logic can be applied toward a truckload of housekeeping scripts all competing for time in the day, and all potentially affecting the integrity of another.

Mine hasn't gone away this time. It did the last time. Odd.

Same here, I only have two and they both keep repeatedly deleting. I made sure to save the text on hard drive, but it is SO annoying to have to cut & paste...blah blah. I check everyday now too.

Sol

Well doh, my ad was deleted last night. Fortunately I noticed right away (and I mean right away, like it was there then two minutes later it wasn't) so I replaced it with no problem.

I lost one of mine last night too.

Two out of my four are gone as well. Not doing anything but adding the information here so the Lindens will hopefully really see that they need to seriously address the issue, not just duct tape it.

Bah I just realized my other 3 ads also disappeared. Wasn't charged but still, considering the last time I looked at them, it's probably been up to 3 days they've been gone. Guess I'll have to check the DAILY...

My main had some clas ads which never even showed up