'Inventory flattening'

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

According to a friend, there's this rumor going around on Facebook that sends people into a frenzy.

The rumor is that Linden Lab is going to 'flatten' the inventories of SL residents - i.e. to take items out of folders that are 'too full' and relocate them in other, smaller folders. One resident claims that this already happened to her. It seems to have stirred a heated debate on the platform.

Does anyone have any clue as to whether this rumor is rooted into some kind of truth? Or is this just one of the many reasons to stay away from Facebook?

Edited August 29, 2022 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Theresa Tennyson]

1 minute ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

According to a friend, there's this rumor going around on Facebook that sends people into a frenzy.

The rumor is that Linden Lab is going to 'flatten' the inventories of SL residents - i.e. to take items out of folders that are 'too full' and relocate them in other, smaller folders. One resident claims that this already happened to her. It seems to have stirred a heated debate on the platform.

Does anyone have any clue as to whether this rumor is rooted into some kind of truth? Or is this just one of the many reasons to stay away from Facebook?

Technically it would be unflattening. If you have a directory with such an obscene number of entries within a single division/folder that it would cause problems with that division loading then Support can run a routine that will break up that load into smaller folders. As far as "Linden Lab is going to do this in a widespread way (presumably by cossacks ruffling through your things while presenting at best heavily redacted warrants)?" Probably hoohah.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

Maybe someone stumbled upon this otherwise extremely interesting video about heap data structures, but then let their imagination go wild and started a bunch of BS on FB for likes. If you pardon me going off on a tangent.

 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

This was posted in May.

 

"Starting Tuesday, June 21st, Support will implement a process to stabilize only those inventories affected.  For the small group of Residents this affects, you may see a change to the organization of your inventory, but all your objects are still there.  If you encounter any difficulty with your inventory, please reach out to our Support Team https://support.secondlife.com"

[Love Zhaoying]

10 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Technically it would be unflattening. If you have a directory with such an obscene number of entries within a single division/folder that it would cause problems with that division loading then Support can run a routine that will break up that load into smaller folders. As far as "Linden Lab is going to do this in a widespread way (presumably by cossacks ruffling through your things while presenting at best heavily redacted warrants)?" Probably hoohah.

^^ What she said!

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Maybe someone stumbled upon this otherwise extremely interesting video about heap data structures, but then let their imagination go wild and started a bunch of BS on FB for likes. If you pardon me going off on a tangent.

 

Looks more like  "B-Tree" to me, probably a Larch!

[Lindal Kidd]

For once, the rumor is true, @Arduenn Schwartzman. Although the idea is to UN-flatten inventories. People who have only a few folders, but with thousands of items in them, have a "flat" inventory structure.

This can cause problems with things like logging in.

So LL is being proactive for once, and un-flattening the inventories of some people. I think I came across an example the other day showing how they are going about it. A person posted on one of the help forums, complaining that her top level inventory now looked like:

• Folders 1
• Folders 2
• Folders 3
• Folders 4
• Folders 5
• Folders 6
• Folders 7

...and each "Folders" folder contained sub-folders, of course.

So, if you are one of those people who habitually throw everything into one big folder called "My Stuff" and rely on Search to find things in there, you might want to do some organizing, if you don't want LL to organize it for you.

[Coffee Pancake]

32 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Does anyone have any clue as to whether this rumor is rooted into some kind of truth? Or is this just one of the many reasons to stay away from Facebook?

There are some technical problems that can occur if your inventory is VERY flat, that is, you have a crazy amount of items in a single folder or the root of you inventory. Mainly this affects people who have never made a folder in their lives.

When this problem strikes it ends up being a support issue and you need a Linden to come in and make some folders and unfunge things, so .. having a system in place that automatically makes a folder or two when you're getting close to the danger zone is really just saving everyones time.

Automatically flattening inventory would be the exact opposite and a very bad idea, so maybe this is just more mindless facebook panic .. hey, at least it's doesn't involve trans people this time!!

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Coffee Pancake said:

so maybe this is just more mindless facebook panic .. hey, at least it's doesn't involve trans people this time!!

Kind of them to keep the mindless panic on Facebook, and off the Forum!

[Marianne Little]

I am not sure if I understand this.

Is it good or bad to have a "Furniture" main folder, with sub-folders like: "Apple Fall", "Fancy Decor" "Loft & Aria", "Vespertine".... with their own sub-folders for no copy items, boxed items and such?

How many sub-folders in a big folder is too many? 

How many items can a main folder hold? Does sub-folders let me have larger main folders?

How many items can the default folders over "trash" in the inventory hold? Folders like "Body Parts" and "Animations". Under animations I have a big folder for "Stun" with a subfolder for each animation set, and a folder for boxes. Same for the other main stores and folders with "Old stuff" that I have no time to test and delete. 

Is this good?

 

[Lindal Kidd]

Marianne, don't worry. It sounds like your inventory is nicely organized. It's only when a folder contains several thousand items that problems can arise. (Not sub folders, those don't count for this purpose).

[Bree Giffen]

Maybe some guidelines from LL on what to do? I have subfolders but they don't make a deep folder tree. It's usually something like a main clothes folder, with several subcategory clothing type folders and then folders by stores. So the folder tree usually is about three deep but that third layer has lots of folders.

[Lindal Kidd]

Again, it's not FOLDERS that matter, but ITEMS.

If your folder contains over 5,000 ITEMS (objects, textures, clothing layers, animations, sound files, scripts, notecards) then you can start being worried.

[LittleMe Jewell]

12 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Again, it's not FOLDERS that matter, but ITEMS.

If your folder contains over 5,000 ITEMS (objects, textures, clothing layers, animations, sound files, scripts, notecards) then you can start being worried.

Actually, if I understand correctly from various postings over time, folders CAN also cause a problem.

If you have FOLDER-A and it contains 20,000 folders at the first level in FOLDER-A, that is still a problem.  Too many things (folder or item) at a single level causes the viewer to have issues loading up the inventory.

No single level within a folder should contain more than roughly 5000 things.

Edited August 29, 2022 by LittleMe Jewell

[Madelaine McMasters]

...starts a rumor that LL will automatically rename things titled "Object" if they find more than 5,000 of them in any folder.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

...starts a rumor that LL will automatically rename things titled "Object" if they find more than 5,000 of them in any folder.

Are you objecting?

[TimKoul]

This should have been handled way differently than LL just marching in and re-organizing a users inventory without their knowledge. Second Life has a Facebook and a Twitter but it was only announced on their blog? There was no, "hey, you better organize your inventory before we do. You have x days"? 

 

[Jenna Huntsman]

9 minutes ago, TimKoul said:

This should have been handled way differently than LL just marching in and re-organizing a users inventory without their knowledge. Second Life has a Facebook and a Twitter but it was only announced on their blog? There was no, "hey, you better organize your inventory before we do. You have x days"? 

 

You say that, but these are people whose inventories are so flat, they probably can't login. As far as I'm aware, LL have been contacting affected residents beforehand to give them a chance to fix things.

[Marianne Little]

53 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Marianne, don't worry. It sounds like your inventory is nicely organized. It's only when a folder contains several thousand items that problems can arise. (Not sub folders, those don't count for this purpose).

I have only done this with big stores. The rest is chaos. I have folders like "2017", "2018" and up. But it is in folders with subfolders. Folders is always good? 

[Marianne Little]

22 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Actually, if I understand correctly from various postings over time, folders CAN also cause a problem.

If you have FOLDER-A and it contains 20,000 folders at the first level in FOLDER-A, that is still a problem.  Too many things (folder or item) at a single level causes the viewer to have issues loading up the inventory.

No single level within a folder should contain more than roughly 5000 things.

Oh, I must check my numbers. Single level is bad? Spread out like a family tree of folders is better?

I think I understand, but I have a day where I struggle to "get" it.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Marianne Little said:

Oh, I must check my numbers. Single level is bad? Spread out like a family tree of folders is better?

I think I understand, but I have a day where I struggle to "get" it.

Me too, lots of low-comprehension here: my way to deal with this is to make subfolders for ongoing scripts for each 10-20 minor version numbers (version 1.1-1.19 for example), and also backup the scripts on my PC.

Haven't seen more than a couple (2?) complaints on here about people who were actually affected. 

[TimKoul]

20 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

You say that, but these are people whose inventories are so flat, they probably can't login. As far as I'm aware, LL have been contacting affected residents beforehand to give them a chance to fix things.

My friends experience was quite different. She could log in just fine and all she got was a warning on her account page which she barely checks. She was rightfully mad about it. So if that's the extent of the "contact" LL has been doing, it's not good enough.

[Alwin Alcott]

10 minutes ago, TimKoul said:

My friends experience was quite different. She could log in just fine and all she got was a warning on her account page which she barely checks. She was rightfully mad about it. So if that's the extent of the "contact" LL has been doing, it's not good enough.

it's published on the primary channels where LL anounces their things. Blogs, front accountpage, and even discussed in the forums.

It's a bit like governemental communications, if residents don't read it, well... it's published.
Residents have the right to be informed, but also the duty to stay informed.

Edited August 29, 2022 by Alwin Alcott

[TimKoul]

1 minute ago, Alwin Alcott said:

it's published on the primary channels where LL anounces their things. Blogs, front accountpage, and even discussed in the forums.

It's a bit like governemental communications, if residents don't read it, well... it's published.
Residents have the right to be informed, but the duty to keep being informed.

They also have Facebook and Twitter. Who's going to look at their account page religiously every day to see if they got some stupid warning from LL just to know if their inventories are targeted? And honestly, who reads blogs? The only people who care about the blog are the ones here on the forum. The majority of users are on Facebook and Twitter, not here. And honestly, this convo can be combined with that user retention thread because if all LL does is use the blog and  account page to communicate, they are ignoring a HUGE slice of their userbase. 

[Theresa Tennyson]

 

1 hour ago, TimKoul said:

This should have been handled way differently than LL just marching in and re-organizing a users inventory without their knowledge. Second Life has a Facebook and a Twitter but it was only announced on their blog? There was no, "hey, you better organize your inventory before we do. You have x days"? 

 

They also posted it on Facebook on May 19.