Returning prims across parcel lines.

[JudiLynn India]

In earlier years, it was always impossible to return a neighbor's prim that overhung your land if the root was on their land. However several years ago, I discovered it was suddenly possible.  In one of many instances, I returned a friend's tree to his inventory when some of the branches were overhanging my parcel. He said I couldn't, but I did.  I have also done so with others (for legitimate reason). 
But tonight, my friend and I rented neighboring parcels and I had him place a tree near my parcel with overhanging branches - same as before - but I was NOT able to return it. He also linked two prims and kept the root on his land and I was unable to return that either.
Have I been hallucinating everytime I've done a return or did the SL programming change again?
*I returned a tree from a griefing neighbor just last year. Any insight?

[Qie Niangao]

6 hours ago, JudiLynn India said:

But tonight, my friend and I rented neighboring parcels 

Did you try returning items you rezzed directly on each other's parcels? This is a little obscure and depends on the details of the rental, but it's possible to set it up so tenants cannot return other tenants' items if all tenants share the same land group. (You can see why.) And that would apply whether the items are rooted on the returner's parcel or merely encroaching.

(I haven't checked to make sure encroaching item return still works, but it's certainly not your imagination: it's worked for years, although for the first few of them it didn't work for Linden plants.)

[JudiLynn India]

18 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Did you try returning items you rezzed directly on each other's parcels? This is a little obscure and depends on the details of the rental, but it's possible to set it up so tenants cannot return other tenants' items if all tenants share the same land group. (You can see why.) And that would apply whether the items are rooted on the returner's parcel or merely encroaching.

(I haven't checked to make sure encroaching item return still works, but it's certainly not your imagination: it's worked for years, although for the first few of them it didn't work for Linden plants.)

No, we didn't try returning items rezzed on the same parcel. I was demonstrating to him that your neighbor can return an item to your inventory if it is encroaching on their property, ie. tree limbs hanging over the property line.
And I actually did wonder if the set group had anything to do with it failing last night. We did not set our separate parcels to different groups.
I knew I wasn't imaging all the returns I've made on different parcels. I did a return as recent as about 6 months ago. So something had to be different. 
Of course we can't return Linden property. lol Wouldn't THAT be chaos!

[Qie Niangao]

5 hours ago, JudiLynn India said:

Of course we can't return Linden property. lol Wouldn't THAT be chaos!

Oh, yeah, there's special treatment for some stuff, like Estate owners' stuff on their regions, and Linden/Mole content on Mainland.

But what I meant by "Linden plants" was resident-owned copies of trees and grasses from the Library, the weird ones that all cost 1 LI per item regardless of size and have their own "Plants" quality slider in viewer graphics preferences. They don't seem to have a regular "shape" and that not only makes them hard to grab in the build tool but also kept the physics engine from being able to tell when they're encroaching. Apparently they figured out a way.

[animats]

The built-in trees and grasses are special case built in objects. They're not meshes. They're not sculpts. They're not prims. Their scale is interpreted differently for each tree species. They have their very own level of detail system. They have strange ownership and placement rules. They don't have a physics model, so you can walk through them. They're generated procedurally, and each one is supposed to be different.

So, no surprise that they don't encroach in the same ways as other objects. That probably has something to do with their scale weirdness.