Quartz Mole

We don't normally close threads on request, I'm afraid.

Good news, everyone! Derrick Linden and I have been working on this. We've finished checking and all the buckets seem to be working again! Sorry for the breakdown and best of luck with the remaining hours of the hunt!

Good news, everyone! Derrick Linden and I have been working on this. We've finished checking and all the buckets seem to be working again! Sorry for the breakdown and best of luck with the remaining hours of the hunt!

Good news, everyone! Derrick Linden and I have been working on this. We've finished checking and all the buckets seem to be working again! Sorry for the breakdown and best of luck with the remaining hours of the hunt!

That's not up to me. I've messaged the Linden who is overseeing the hunt to tell them what's happened (linking to this thread) and we'll doubtless discuss it tomorrow when they get to work. We'll just have to hope that Google sheets are responding by then, and see what happens. I have to say, though, that there are technical reasons why extending the hunt isn't as easy as you might think.

No, if you get the "busy" message, you can return to the bucket and click it once it's working again, and then it should play the animation and update your HUD.

Resetting the bucket will make it touchable again, but the next time someone touches it, unless Google returns the expected confirmation, it will stall again. The bucket will keep on trying to contact Google until it's successful and, once it is, it should start operating as normal. So there's no need to keep re-rezzing the buckets. The problem will persist until things are sorted out at Google's end, I'm afraid, but then they'll clear themselves automatically.

Thanks for the reports. This is happening because of some work Google seem to be doing with Google Sheets, which are part of our record-keeping process. When the buckets try to post data about someone collecting a candy, they're receiving the electronic equivalent of "the web page you requested is temporarily unavailable," and that's stalling them. I've seen this happen once before with Google Sheets (not with the candy buckets). It lasted for a few hours and then things went back to normal. I'm really sorry -- it's very frustrating (and it's meant I've had to suspend work on an urgent project, too) but there's nothing I can do about it, I'm afraid. Once Google fix things at their end, the buckets should be able to reset themselves and start working about, but in the meantime we just have to be patient and wait.

Things are getting rather heated. May I suggest that, if you think something is obstructing a public waterway, the best course of action is to AR it in world and let Governance deal with it? Arguing here about what people should or shouldn't do isn't getting anyone anywhere.

You haven't, or not according to my records. I've just checked the uuids of all the parcels where you have touched a bucket and they are all unique. In answer to the question about how the data is collected, every time someone touches a bucket, the identity of the toucher, the uuid and location of the parcel where the bucket is, and the identity of the parcel owner are recorded automatically, both as KVP values and in a spreadsheet. And, just to clarify -- there are over 950 different buckets on different parcels that have been touched at least once. We also keep count of how many times each bucket has been touched, but that's not what I was talking about.

Sorry, but I wouldn't feel comfortable giving out that kind of information. It's not mine to release.

I've just checked our records and, to date, people have collected candy from buckets on more than 950 different parcels, so it's worth going out looking, since there seem to be a lot of parcels that aren't on any lists.

@Nika TalajThanks for the suggestions. The first is certainly possible, though I wonder, if we did something on those lines, if it wouldn't be simpler just to send a bucket to everyone in the first place, without waiting for someone to rez one on the region first. I also suspect, though, that we'd get a lot of complaints about being spammed. The second is an attractive idea but, knowing how he bucket is scripted at the moment, I'd be cautious about trying to adapt it to accommodate enhanced scores for groups. A surprising number of things have to happen between someone touching the bucket and it giving them some candy, all of which require error handling, and if the bucket needed to handle multiple touchers at a time, and to award different scores depending on the number of touchers, It would probably be considerably simpler to rescript it from scratch than to try to tinker with the existing script. Scripting it to work for a single toucher turned out to be more complicated than I expected, so I suspect that looping through lists of touchers would probably lead to some unexpected issues, too. In either event, I'm not sure that Patch would consider it the best use of my time, or that of QA, who would have to check and approve the new bucket. Tier prizes isn't my decision either, of course, but I'll certainly show your post to the people who decide such things, so your ideas can be considered for next year.

Generally I have difficulty decoding Patch's picture clues, despite enjoying what might be considered the advantage of knowing what the answers are. Though that might just be me, of course.

I now know what the problem is, or at least why the HUD doesn't update until you leave the parcel if it's a no script parcel, and will fix this in next year's HUD (assuming there is one, of course). If anyone's interested, it's because I'd forgotten that my trick to keep scripts in attachments running on parcels with scripts turned off, calling llTakeControls in the run_time_permissions event, protects only scripts in the same prim as the script that has taken controls. The script that updates the HUD display is in a child prim, so I need to drop a separate script into that to take controls there, too, or have the script we use to handle the display take controls, too. That doesn't explain why the sounds didn't play, since the bucket plays those, so I suspect that may have been because sounds were restricted to the parcel only and you were not on the parcel. Or it may have been some breakdown in communication between the server and your computer. Thanks to @Paulsianfor pointing me to some parcels where I could test the bug in the wild.

It should work whether or not scripts are disabled on the parcel. If it happens again, please send me a slurl for the parcel and I'll go over and take a look. It may just have been a temporary delay in communications between the HUD and the dataserver -- when the bucket plays the animation it also tells the HUD to check your updated score by reading a KVP key, and that can sometimes take a few seconds to happen. But certainly the parcel settings shouldn't normally affect whether the HUD works. You may not be hearing the bucket play the sounds if you're not not on the parcel and the owner has restricted sounds to their parcel or it may be because of some communications issue between the simulator and your computer.

If, as the owner, you touch your bucket and hold down your left mouse key for at least a second before releasing it, the bucket should tell you how many times it's been touched.

That's just what we want you to think (but, then, I would say that, wouldn't I?).

Certainly we can never have enough of that!

We always start on the assumption that, when people do things that are against the Covenant, it's because they don't know what the restrictions are rather than because they're deliberately ignoring them. If it keeps on happening, that's a bit different, but we always start on the basis that it's an innocent mistake.

Locked the thread because the theme seems to have moved from Inworld Employment to Role Play.

I think we've sent them out once or twice before, but they've not been a regular occurrence. Patch asked us to send out a general reminder because he was concerned about the number of Covenant Violations we're having to deal with, particularly non-compliant security systems and skyboxes/work platforms rezzed below 2000 metres, and because quite frequently, when we message people about orbs, skyboxes and other issues, it turns out they aren't aware there's a Covenant or any restrictions at all. Everyone received a reminder, and receiving one doesn't mean we think you're necessarily in breach of the Covenant.

Thanks for the reply. That's helped me to identify (and, I hope, fix) a bug in the tool we use quickly to identify a resident's parcel. I hope your problems with the Overlook are as easily fixed (I did tell them that calling it "The Overlook" was a bad idea. If you see two spooky little girl avatars hanging round the place, run for it!).

Are you sure it's your log home and not that of an alt? According to my records, your Linden Home is not on a log region.

I'm really not sure that discussions of posters' use of the various reaction emojis is on entirely topic for this thread.