Last weekend I was fiddling with Groups. I had an old group that I had used for ages when ever I got a new parcel. I also used it on Binemist, but it seemed that time had run past that group and I wanted to change it to a new group – a Binemist Group – and I wanted that group to be the group for the SIM Binemist. I was also thinking about maybe making a community of some sort with that group.
But when you deed a SIM/parcel to a group, you cannot change that. What you have to do is sell the parcel to yourself and deed the parcel to the new group. I googled it… I read that it was very important to turn off auto-return, which I did, and everything went according to plan. Binemist is now deeded to the new Binemist Group.
Thursday morning I logged in to do a ‘Je Suis Charlie’ tribute, and I noticed some balloons, someone had left behind. I flew over and thought that I could use them for my snapshot too, and I think my tribute come out very well.
After I published the photo, I thought to myself: “I must remember to reset the auto-return. Why not do it now!” And so I did. I was standing on a piece of ice with the last Polar Bears of the world and watch how first the balloons and the the bears and the ice disappeared and I fell to the bottom of the sea and saw the underwater world disappear too. I also saw massive amount of stuff coming back into my Lost & Found folder in my inventory.
That’s when I realised what I had done.
OMFG! Darn it!
I almost called in sick to work to get started on fixing it right away, but then I woke up to reality. Not a good idea to skip work unless you are really sick, and certainly not to fix a broken hobby. Instead I closed off the SIM to anyone but group members, posted a explainable snapshot to flickr and went to work. When I got home in the evening, I was too tired to login, and the same on the Friday. But Saturday I woke at 5 in the morning – I couldn’t sleep any longer, the how-to-fix was running havoc in my head – so I got up and logged in.
I think it was probably good that I had some time to think about how to fix Binemist. Had I gone in Thursday morning to start fixing my wrong, I think I might have made it worse. As it stands now I have replaced the platform in the sky – alas 8 meters higher than the old platform, but I hope I have sort of taken care of anyone logging in with the old landmark. I have placed a little platform where the old landmark would take you and then I placed a teleporter up to the platform’s new height.
Logging in as early as I did, Michaell (who lives on SL time) was online – watching a baseball game and hanging out before bedtime. He came over and kept me company, played the ukulele and gave advice. He is such a sweetheart
Due to a previous landlord’s actions (probably groups-related as well) I also had an auto-return disaster when I was sitting in my club (this was years ago and it’s long gone). I remember the feeling of watching things just disappear and hearing all my items returned to my inventory as if it was a black hole. For another reason entirely – again groups related – one of our early Basilique builds was also returned (it was only a small part – but wow… the work in getting it back…). I don’t even want to imagine a whole region being returned. This is why I’m a nervous wreck whenever I’m making region setting changes – you really are only one button away from catastrophe. Something to consider though (it might not be relevant, but good for future), I called Linden Lab once to ask about region wide reparcelling, and they said they kept backups of sims you could restore if things went really south. So at least there is that if a major disaster strikes.
Yes it is very disturbing, and good to know that Linden Lab would be able to restore everything. Luckily Binemist is not a full region, just a homestead, and I see it as an opportunity fine-tune and go through everything again (well… I do now… After I thought about it for a while… ;o))