"We’ve received a recent rise in reports of inventory loss, including inventory resulting back to default, including your avatar. We’re actively investigating this and having already helped a number of Residents, we’re continuing to work on individual cases.
In order to help you better, as with bugs and issues in general, it’s important that if you think you’re affected, that you rule out other causes first."
The entry then goes on to blame everything else, such as if you're using a wi-fi connection or if you might have given items to someone else by mistake.
To me, the entire tone of the posting is disrespectful. The point of it seems to be an attempt to blame ANY other cause than the system. It's even technically misleading, since although wi-fi "hotspots" can indeed cause high packet loss if there's 100 users all sitting in a massive lounge (at an airport for example) surfing wirelessly at the same time, but a home user with two or three PCs linked to their wireless router is not ever going to experience the same degree of packet loss unless they have faulty equipment. I've got Sympatico High Speed Unplugged, what could be termed the ultimate in wifi (the modem doesn't even plug into a phone line) and yet I can still play SL without any issues. Also, many people who play SL play other online games as well, and if they had an important issue such as high packet loss, the other games would be unplayable. In all the cases I've heard of, or spoken to people about, this hasn't been the case.
Inventory loss means the item has gone. If you give it to someone else, you receive notification "Unfortunate Victim has accepted your inventory offer." If you get it returned, you receive a notification "Your item 'Linden Prayer T-Shirt' has been returned to your lost and found folder from plot testbed due to auto return rules" - people complain of inventory loss when they log on, open their inventory and half of it is missing.
In an attempt to aid Linden Labs in their diagnosing, here would be my checklist:
Have you just logged on? If you've just logged on, and half of your inventory isn't appearing, then you may have inventory loss. If you get it during a session keep an eye out for server messages in your chat log. A server message such as "Can't find
Have you cleared your cache? This is actually not a bad idea, since SL doesn't seem to know some of the time what to do with its cache, and in any case it crashes so often it frequently doesn't clean up what it was doing in a previous session, and this can lead to problems.
Is there an obvious message in your chat log to explain your loss? Such as the ones I've detailed above. Yes, it is also possible to drop entire folders into objects, but it's uncommon since a lot of inventory loss doesn't occur at home, and involves packaged items rather than folders. I would also say here that to drop ONE folder into an item by mistake is unusual. To drop SEVERAL folders into items is so unusual as to be not worth considering. People complain of inventory loss when they have no idea what happened to folders, they don't generally complain of it when they were using that folder a moment ago.
In your inventory's 'Recent Items' tab, do the items appear there? This means you were using them, and can clear up if you've dropped them into items. If it doesn't appear here, you haven't been using these items recently.
As for "search the knowledge base" - well, that's a laughable attempt to sidestep responsibility. If someone's got a problem and they HAVE caused it themselves and not realised it... trust me, they are NOT going to know enough about the situation to be able to find answers in the knowledge base, and those that know how the system works will already know whether or not the knowledge base can help.
I've often wondered why, if items are "ours", they're all kept serverside. If we've created an item surely the details of that item should be stored locally, on our own system, and uploaded to Linden Labs only as required? Looking at my inventory I've already got over 3000 items; people whose accounts are older may have tens of thousands of items. Is it not putting LL's asset server under too much pressure to have to store ALL of these serverside? Especially if a lot of them are attachments. Why must these things all be serverside, and prone to vanishing if a server hiccups?
Linden Labs, surely it should signify a problem if SUDDENLY there's been a rise in inventory loss complaints. Yes, there'll always be a level of complaints, from people who haven't actually lost anything... but if for several days you have 100 complaints and the next day you have 1000, then there's obviously something gone wrong or those 900 other people would be complaining on the other days too. It would be helpful - and respectful - if you made sure your own house was in order before trying to blame everyone and everything else!
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