Chic at Ebbe's Place

In real life many of us know about the mysterious disappearance of socks. We seem to have many singles and no mates. We buy more sock as matching is important to the fashion conscious -- and we continue to lose socks.

Things have been disappearing in my virtual world. This isn't a new event; my first was six years ago -- my biggest, a loss of 10,000 home and garden items about four years ago. I kept backups when I could. That backup folder also disappeared. What's a gal to do.

I know it isn't just me. Folks write on the forums all the time about lost inventory. Others get on and tell them that it is only their cache that isn't working and we NEVER lose inventory. Well, I know better.

I note things are gone from time to time. I try not to let it bother me and with a sim to caretake I know have a lot of rezzables out in world (a slightly but not guaranteed safer place).

A couple of days ago I noted that a previous working texture change item I had made was no longer working. I fiddled a bit making it work but not as designed. Today I wanted to add some flower textures to a new build. They were gone. Others were also absent including ones I know were in my inventory a couple of months ago as I needed to find them in order to get a legal transfer to Inworldz. So I have the textures THERE but not HERE. I do have the normal maps that I generated to go WITH some of the missing foliage.  Hmmmm.

Another odd thing happened today. A pouf no longer contained all its animations. Script errors looking for animations came up more often than the poses -- well often anyway.

All this got me wondering if textures and animations -- and who knows what else -- might have been deleted purposefully. I have only had one placeholder plywood box appear in my inventory from a DMCA charge. It was a dance. I didn't care about it. I deleted the plywood placeholder. But what if textures are in question -- do we get the same head's up or are they simply deleted from the database?

I don't know the answer to that any more than I know WHY I am missing so many things and other items aren't working. Happily it seems like even if the texture is missing from the database (my UUID one anyway), items are not broken; the textures still appear on them.

It is still murky so far as porting textures over to The New World. Obviously we could reupload our own handmade textures, and The Lab could legally -- OK "legally" move our textures over for us under the August TOS of "we can do anything with all content" clause. Does that mean all the illegally uploaded textures would go into the new world? It is impossible to stop the uploading of stolen and copyrighted textures. We see them everyday in world.

While I would like to think this new disappearing syndrome was somehow connected to cleaning up stolen items on the grid, I am guessing it is most likely just another database meltdown.

Later note before this gets posted: Sunday morning I found a folder with many folders within it from Dec 2013. I clean my inventory regularly and this just (JUST) appeared. Another previously deleted folder from long ago also appeared. The textures did not :(.  So I suspect this is yet another inventory issue. It seems like that will never be remedied.