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I Can't Believe This Absolute Horror


Prokofy Neva
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As you know, I started a thread about inventory loss here.

So just now, I was flying around and suddenly I got this odd system message: "Your trash is overflowing".

Huh? I've never had a message like that in my entire 12 years of SL.

So I look carefully at my Trash folder, mindful that something quite weird is going on and I could be screwed over.

I carefully look at the dozen or so objects in it -- some deleted grass -- and I carefully look at the folders. There are no more than 20 items in trash, none high prim so it seems odd. So I go ahead and flush it, perhaps there's something I don't understand?

This happens as I am trying to find something in inventory I can't find. I then notice there are 83,000 items in inventory, not 97,000 as usual.

I next find that my !!B&B folder with dozens -- hundreds? -- of sub-folders IS GONE.

That means literally some 14,000 or 15,000 items, literally worth thousands of RL dollars at this point, lots of houses, furnitures, rares, gatchas etc. used to decorate rentals, all carefully organized.

I clear cache -- it's still not there.

I filed a ticket and I have no doubt that some low level Linden is going to tell me that too bad, I shouldn't have flushed my trash.

Except, I know for SURE I did not put an entire folder with its hundred sub-folders in trash, and if I had *I would have seen it* when I carefully looked at all the few dozen things in trash. I would have seen it somewhere, inside a folder, i.e. the folders would show with a little arrow. They didn't.

So I filed my ticket as a sim roll-back. That's not the right thing, but perhaps it is related. 

You can be sure I'm going to be publicizing this is the most maximum way.

I also tend to think that this was done deliberately as reprisals for calling attention to this really negative, persistent, widespread problem here on the forums. 

So I can only warn others that if you see a message demanding you to delete trash because it is "overflowing" (whoever heard of such a thing???) don't touch it. File a ticket. Demand action. It's crazy.

 

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The prompt to empty Trash when it has a lot of items in it is a fairly new viewer feature, it was added a few releases ago.
By default you will be prompted to purge trash when there are >5000 items in it.
You can change that limit with the debug setting InventoryTrashMaxCapacity.

The reason it was added was because there had been several cases of people with many many thousands of items in their Trash folder which would either cause their login to time out due to the flat inventory problem, or their viewer would lock up soon after login - one or more inventory folders with tens of thousands of items in them can cause the viewer to freeze up hard when loading inventory causing a disconnect.

If you had not changed the InventoryTrashMaxCapacity debug setting then there must have been more then 5000 items in your Trash to give you the warning.
It does sound like your now missing !!B&B folder was in the Trash folder when you emptied it - which totally sucks & there will be no way to recover those deleted items.

The question is - why did you only see  handful of items in the Trash folder before you emptied it.
The only thing I can think of is, were you checking the contents of your Trash from the Recent tab of inventory or was your inventory set to a filtered view?

 

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Look.

 

I definitely, definitely did not pull a folder into trash. Pulling a folder out of my inventory line-up into trash is NEVER anything I did. The only folders I delete are from the bottom, the "received items" after I've removed their contents. But I did not delete a folder out of the regular line-up.

So how does an entire folder with sub-folders get into trash? Only through a glitch. Not through my direct action.

There was NOT any "more than 5000 items in trash" when I got this message. There were no more than 20! 

But somehow this entire B&B folder got INTO trash without me putting it. I just don't see how I could do that even accidentally. And that triggered the message. I never set anything on that function as I had never heard of it before.

What you are not hearing is that knowing how SL screws up, I CAREFULLY REVIEWED every single thing in trash. There were no more than 20 items. There were a few folders but they had no arrows. They folders from received items I believe. There was nothing to indicate that a folder and further sub-folders with 15,000 items were somehow pulled into those folders!

 

I don't have any filtered view. I simply double clicked on the "trash" icon.

I did not put any 5000 or 15000 items in trash. I put two dozen in trash mash, deleting some things inworld.

For sub-folders with 15,000 items to be deleted, you'd have to consciously drag the top folder into trash. I did not.

 

 

Edited by Prokofy Neva
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Actually it's very easy to delete a folder accidentally. Backspacing at the wrong time trying to rename can do it. Accidental mouse drags happen all the time especially when it is laggy.  I am often finding folders dragged into others by mistake.

It doesn't have to take a conscious effort. Sounds to me like you had 1000s of items in your trash either accidentally or other wise and you emptied it. 

I do a no copy search before clearing my trash each time and review each folder name manually. I can assure you I do find things that I didn't intend to delete.

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I wasn't backspacing and renaming anything Sean.

 

I wasn't dragging folders anywhere.

 

I wasn't doing ANYTHING with folders.

I was deleting a thing in world and then whoops got this YOUR TRASH IS OVERFLOWING MESSAGE

 

You're not reading my original message and grasping that not only wasn't I doing anything with any folders, when I got that message I LOOKED AT the folders in trash and there was nothing like that, i.e. a familiar folder I knew had 15000 items in it!!!! please.

This is an SL glitch.

 

Edited by Prokofy Neva
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1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Look.

 

I definitely, definitely did not pull a folder into trash. Pulling a folder out of my inventory line-up into trash is NEVER anything I did. The only folders I delete are from the bottom, the "received items" after I've removed their contents. But I did not delete a folder out of the regular line-up.

So how does an entire folder with sub-folders get into trash? Only through a glitch. Not through my direct action.

There was NOT any "more than 5000 items in trash" when I got this message. There were no more than 20! 

But somehow this entire B&B folder got INTO trash without me putting it. I just don't see how I could do that even accidentally. And that triggered the message. I never set anything on that function as I had never heard of it before.

What you are not hearing is that knowing how SL screws up, I CAREFULLY REVIEWED every single thing in trash. There were no more than 20 items. There were a few folders but they had no arrows. They folders from received items I believe. There was nothing to indicate that a folder and further sub-folders with 15,000 items were somehow pulled into those folders!

 

I don't have any filtered view. I simply double clicked on the "trash" icon.

I did not put any 5000 or 15000 items in trash. I put two dozen in trash mash, deleting some things inworld.

For sub-folders with 15,000 items to be deleted, you'd have to consciously drag the top folder into trash. I did not.

 

 

Yep.

In theory if you file a database loss ticket RIGHT AWAY you MIGHT be able to get your items back IF you have exact names of items. This however doesn't always (or ever?) work.

Not new news and I have STARS in front of all my important folders now so that I REALLY notice before I empty my trash. 

*****I HAVE NEVER SEEN ANY OF MY FOLDERS IN THE TRASH BEFORE PURGING --- yet mysteriously those items are just GONE. *****

Hopefully you can get some re-deliveries.  I know you bought my Southern Comfort Victorians at Draftsman awhile ago. Happy to send you other copies if you lost them.

 

 

 

Edited by Chic Aeon
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I did file a ticket immediately.

I do have exclamation points in front of this most valuable folder obviously.

That's why I know it wasn't there in trash when I examined the folders.

I think one issue is that you can't make a folder that is a sub-folder of OBJECTS and then sub-folders in THAT sub-folder as it creates a single point of failure.

In fact I asked the Lindens about this! And they said it was ok to do this. After I used to have it in another odd system folder that was some temp thing they put in while fixing inventory. 

So while it's annoying not to see them all lined up in one folder, making them all with stars as subs of OBJECTS may mean the single point of failure is removed.

Not that this folder issue is operative in every inventory loss.

As for "names of objects," I can't start giving them thousands of names

Some I will find on Casper and could give them or I remember them but honestly, they need to fix this problem in the worst way.

 

One thing of yours I can't find are those stone tiles with the flowers inside them.

 

Edited by Prokofy Neva
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13 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I did file a ticket immediately.

 

 

One thing of yours I can't find are those stone tiles with the flowers inside them.

Well come by and look and let me know what you had. They are off of the courtyard toward the southwest and pretty easy to find.    Sorry. Know it is depressing. It has happened so often to me I am pretty much immune these days. And NO we did NOT delete the folders. I always look carefully though my trash before deleting (well duh). The most I could lose by not noticing would be a single item or two.  

 

Insert Sigh. 

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Thanks. I did look carefully through my trash before flushing. That's how I know that a big folder with exclamation points and 15,000 items in sub-folders wasn't in there.

You really should have a re-delivery terminal. All merchants should have them.

Edited by Prokofy Neva
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3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I definitely, definitely did not pull a folder into trash. Pulling a folder out of my inventory line-up into trash is NEVER anything I did. The only folders I delete are from the bottom, the "received items" after I've removed their contents. But I did not delete a folder out of the regular line-up.

~2 weeks ago, I was decorating a set and pulled out an item that, while gacha, I had exchanged for transfer permissions. I thought it odd that it left the folder as if it was no copy, but assumed that maybe it was an issue with a script or other item inside the mesh was no copy, and shrugged it off. I then checked its rezzed perms, to find it was indeed, all no transfer as expected.

Checking my inventory I discovered that a folder called "THE ARCADE GACHA EVENTS" was sitting in my trash. This particular folder includes tens of thousands of items, collected since the initial September 2012 run of the event. I would absolutely not drag that folder to the trash, and while I acknowledge that sometimes things get dragged off in odd ways, it seemed rather unlikely. I did immediately pull and preserve the folder, but I now find myself wondering if my experience, and Prokofy's, are in some way related. 

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Two things occur to me. Perhaps the inventory hadn't fully loaded when you had a look in your Trash, and the message was sent due to how much was still to load. In that case, you wouldn't have seen the folder in the Trash. After all, 20 items does seem to be a very small number for what I imagine would be in an average Trash.

The other thing is that the two aren't related, and that spotting the folder missing at that time was just coincidence.

A third thing just popped into my head. In your OP, you suggested that it was deliberate, because of your other thread about missing inventory items. Whilst that's possible, I simply don't believe it. If a Linden was found to have done that, s/he'd be looking for a job in a hurry.

 

4 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I definitely, definitely did not pull a folder into trash.

Not deliberately, no, but, as we've seen in this thread, it doesn't mean that the directory didn't find its way into the Trash somehow.

Edited by Phil Deakins
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6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I also tend to think that this was done deliberately as reprisals for calling attention to this really negative, persistent, widespread problem here on the forums. 

Sorry to hear of your loss Prok. Hopefully the lab can work with you to roll back your inventory.

I can't however believe that a rogue employee would do this. Not just because of ethics that should be a given, but there would be logs to show that devious action was taken. They would lose their livelyhood.

This will be a bug, or an unfortunate set of circumstances that trigger some outlier case, causing that folder to be caught up in the purge.

Best advice, until you have finished discussing it with the Lab is to keep your inventory changes to a minimum, don't add or remove any more. Especially don't buy anything. On the chance they can kindly assist with a rollback then this would erase anything new.

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I don't like conspiracy theories, and I'm sure no one at the Lab would ever do what you suggest. It is a sad coincidence, yes, but I refuse to believe it is more than that, especially because I experienced some weird issue with inventory in the last couple days.

Here's what has been happening: I purchase something (a demo or full product) or just take back into inventory one of my own items rezzed in-world, and it only shows there after I re-log. It hasn't happened too often, but has been happening enough times to get me worried now, after reading your post. At first, I thought it was because I was at very busy regions (Fantasy Faire) but it also happened at a premium sandbox where there was only one other avatar at the time. And my inventory is half the size of yours... and no, I don't have a flat inventory — at all.

Now, when was the last in-depth asset database maintenance performed? I mean a proper scheduled maintenance, not one of those emergencies when it's already broken.

Edited by MBeatrix
grammar
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A while back I noticed my Living Room folder in the trash. I assume I put it there, it's exactly the kind of braindead thing I would do. It was alarming, and confirmed my longtime policy not to purge trash more than once a year or so, and then only the oldest things in the trash. 

I did for a while get the message I need to empty trash, so I purged a Few older things and have not gotten the message since, even tho I am quite sure there are more than 5k things in it. 

Moral of my story: There are advantages to being a trash hoarder in SL.

Edited by Pamela Galli
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i had not seen my folder beeing moved in the trash...but sl was very buggy...rolling restarts...lag and so on...so at reboot i was asked to clan trash and i did...then the folder objects with over 3000 items in it was gone. also my mp folders were all empty.... its HORRORRRRRRRRR

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I have never put or seen folders in my inventory apart from occasional outfits that I have discarded and those are only links.  HOWEVER, I have noticed on many occasions that when I delete, say, 4 items, none of which have links pointing to them, my inventory count has dropped by more than four, sometimes as many as 200!  I have a suspicion (and it is no more than that) that the inventory asset server or one of the SL processes that access it is glitching badly and may be buggy.  Maybe this is at the root of these inventory problems?

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I actually keep my trash emptied most of the time, in an effort to not accidentally delete things.  I almost always carefully check it and then empty it before logging off.  When I log on again, I recheck to ensure it is still empty. With it always being empty upon login, it makes it much easier for me to verify the contents before I clear it at the end of my session.  I started doing this when I lost a semi-large folder once and actually figured I had mistakenly deleted it.  Back then my trash would sometimes get large enough that a thorough evaluation wasn't really possible before clearing it and I didn't realize I could purge individual items/folders from it.

Something else that I have done during mass inventory organization efforts is to move the items I want to delete to another folder.  I'll let that sit for a login or two, and then over the course of a few login sessions, I'll move small batches of that folder to trash, clearing trash before logging out as usual.

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6 hours ago, MBeatrix said:

Here's what has been happening: I purchase something (a demo or full product) or just take back into inventory one of my own items rezzed in-world, and it only shows there after I re-log. It hasn't happened too often, but has been happening enough times to get me worried now, after reading your post. At first, I thought it was because I was at very busy regions (Fantasy Faire) but it also happened at a premium sandbox where there was only one other avatar at the time. And my inventory is half the size of yours... and no, I don't have a flat inventory — at all.

Yes! I have been getting this happen recently too - I'd say it started ~ 2months ago.
I put it down to my crappy slow connection since I moved house though.
I usually see the problem on busy regions/shopping events where my connection is already stressed but it has also happened on a region with hardly anything rezzed on it & only myself there.

I've also noticed that when I reproduce that problem & newly aquired inventory items do not display in inventory that sometimes they will appear 10 mins later while still on the busy region, or they will instantly appear in inventory after I teleport to a different region.
Sometimes it need a relog to get those inventory items to display though.

I have a pretty large inventory (132k) & a fairly slow connection which I suspect may be the cause of the problem, though maybe it's nothing to do with that & it's a new bug.
@MBeatrix out of interest, how large is your inventory & how fast is your connection?

Is anyone else seeing this problem lately too?

I've reproduced it on both Firestorm & the LL viewer.

Edited by Whirly Fizzle
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Here we go, Whirly:

inventory has 42,367 items at the moment, and I keep trash empty at all times;

as for my connection to http://tucson.speedtest.net/ (average of 3 tests) I just got 58.70 Mbps download, 3.30 Mbps upload; the ping is high, but it has always been — 185 ms.

I have a 100 Mbps connection, and of course I get a download speed of nearly that when I test it using my ISP's tool. Anyway, my connection seems to have dropped quite some since February 2016, when I did my last test connecting to http://tucson.speedtest.net/... At the time, the average value for download was around 80 Mbps.

I am in Portugal, by the way, and my partner, who is in the UK, has been experiencing the same issue as of late, but she actually has a slow connection.

Note: I use Firestorm only, always the latest release.

Edited by MBeatrix
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3 hours ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Yes! I have been getting this happen recently too - I'd say it started ~ 2months ago.
I put it down to my crappy slow connection since I moved house though.
I usually see the problem on busy regions/shopping events where my connection is already stressed but it has also happened on a region with hardly anything rezzed on it & only myself there.

I've also noticed that when I reproduce that problem & newly aquired inventory items do not display in inventory that sometimes they will appear 10 mins later while still on the busy region, or they will instantly appear in inventory after I teleport to a different region.
Sometimes it need a relog to get those inventory items to display though.

I have a pretty large inventory (132k) & a fairly slow connection which I suspect may be the cause of the problem, though maybe it's nothing to do with that & it's a new bug.
@MBeatrix out of interest, how large is your inventory & how fast is your connection?

Is anyone else seeing this problem lately too?

I've reproduced it on both Firestorm & the LL viewer.

Customers report this to me periodically. A relog usually fixes it, not always.

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@Marianne McGann - Of course it's the exact same thing, the only difference is that you were able to rescue your folder. You likely did NOT put it in trash. I didn't see my folder despite looking carefully, but as Whirly pointed out, maybe I was only looking on "Recent" -- I actually don't think so, because right before noticing the inventory drop and the missing folder, I searched for something I couldn't find, and then the name of the folder and couldn't find that, so I was likely in regular view, not "recent". 
@Whirly Fizzle I haven't seen the problem of inventory acquired not showing, but because of these multiple annoyances where something asks to push something in your inventory and waits for you to click on it, and meanwhile you've kept the box inworld that tells you "all my contents are in inventory" because you want to push the item into a specific folder
@Callum Meriman
@Pamela Galli - Of course this is the exact same bug of course and likely you did NOT accidentally put that folder in trash, it just got moved to trash due to a bug. 


The Lindens really need to research this. It won't unless you FIC types and high-end merchants get them to look at this seriously.

Why do I say this was done to me deliberately? Because I complained about it on behalf of another person, and they don't like negative posts. Why would I suspect them, when it is unlikely, sure? Because I've had a whole rash of really nasty things happen to me in the last six months that indicate they could be trying to get me to leave. ALL my gatcha items -- thousands -- were suddenly dumped off the Marketplace -- copiable items I make were left alone. ALL at once. Not due to any violation or notice of anything but a "technical glitch". I filed a ticket and was told they could "do nothing" but at least that confirmed it was technical. I was also subjected to the worst griefing I've had in years by seemingly the same types, but with new capacities like rapid-rezzing objects you can't delete and deployment of objects even when all build and object entry is turned off. Weeks and weeks of that. And other things as well, from annoying to major. Sure, given how many technical problems go on in SL it's likely not a conspiracy but just a string of bad luck. But even so, I suspect there's more to it. Of course any staff person caught doing something like would lose their job. But maybe not, if they were like, oh, Kadyrov contract men for Putin.
 

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2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Why do I say this was done to me deliberately? Because I complained about it on behalf of another person, and they don't like negative posts. Why would I suspect them, when it is unlikely, sure? Because I've had a whole rash of really nasty things happen to me in the last six months that indicate they could be trying to get me to leave. ALL my gatcha items -- thousands -- were suddenly dumped off the Marketplace -- copiable items I make were left alone. ALL at once. Not due to any violation or notice of anything but a "technical glitch".

I really don't believe a Linden did this to you deliberately.
The unlisting &/or accidental deletion or moving (Which causes unlisting) of no copy items in the marketplace listings folder appears to be a bug.
There are a few cases of it on the JIRA, for example: BUG-41686 - All of my NO COPY marketplace items are gone.

The most important thing for all these odd inventory issues is for us all to try and find the exact steps to be able to reproduce the problems.  That's the hard part.  Once there is a solid repro found, the Lindens can fix it.

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Well, I do, for all sorts of reasons, but it is not material to this discussion, because this bug is always real and others have experienced it.

This idea that you have to repro every bug to solve it and that only if you repro it can you have a solution belongs to the software cult and is not scientific.

The rest of science, notably medicine but even engineering solves problems by treating symptoms or finding work-arounds even if they can't immediately find the cause and cure of a disease or a structural defect.

In real businesses, *customer requirements* demand that you have things like back-ups for customers, like a back-up of your server data. If there's a bug, you don't wait for programmers to "repro it". You get your data back, full stop. You pay for this. Amazon provides it. And so on. 

The Lindens are not willing to do that believing it is costly because they don't acknowledge the cost of the departure of customers. I know people who have cancelled premiums and stopped shopping in SL or left SL completely when this inventory loss happens.

There are solutions already readily available, such as taking the proof of purchase in the Market Place which goes back in time for years, or even the 32 days of the account transactions, and for non-copy items not found in the inventory, issuing them again.

Oh, but someone could exploit this by buying stuff, moving it all to an alt, and claiming loss. Well, the rule of the replacement could be that you get a non-transfer version, just like the merchants do with gatcha exchange. Time-consuming, you say? But it could be automated, a collection of all the items by transaction number and then a search of inventory and then an automatic release of all those items from the asset server. Obviously they aren't lost in general, only lost from my inventory.

This isn't a total solution, but it is doable.

But a more durable solution involves providing inventory back-up. This doesn't mean violating copy-right and making copies available in real time now. It means supplying them only in event of loss. After all, it's not the items themselves, but again, the pointers to the asset server from your inventory that shows you paid for them (or made them). There is no reason except political will that this can't be done. Pay $25, a snapshot is taken, and in event of loss, the snapshot is retrieved.

If you put things out on a sim, and that sim crashes and everything is lost, the Lindens do rollbacks. That might mean recent purchases can't be restored but whole builds and what you put out inworld can be! So that should become an automatic program for the Mainland, without the "no" this leads to every time under the false claim that it will upset everyone else's inventory on the sim. Nonsense, half the time the other people consist of no-show oldbies and abandoned land. And this is fixable, again, by capturing the inventory list at the current stage, which might include some people's land and builds, then restoring it to replace yours, then topping off with yours.

Everything in pixels is copyable and storable. Therefore inventory needs to be something the Lindens restore. This is the future of the Metaverse. It is a must-have. It's not optional. They can do it.

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5 hours ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

I really don't believe a Linden did this to you deliberately.
The unlisting &/or accidental deletion or moving (Which causes unlisting) of no copy items in the marketplace listings folder appears to be a bug.
There are a few cases of it on the JIRA, for example: BUG-41686 - All of my NO COPY marketplace items are gone.

The most important thing for all these odd inventory issues is for us all to try and find the exact steps to be able to reproduce the problems.  That's the hard part.  Once there is a solid repro found, the Lindens can fix it.

...and that's going to be a toughie. I know I could not tell you the steps in my case to repro, and could not say with 100% certainty that it wasn't user error - though I have my doubts that it was. Doubly so knowing that Prokofy faced a similar issue. I do feel that this is something that needs to be looked at, regardless. I just wish I had a better "this step here." 

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