April Fools...I Wish!

On Tuesday, April 1, 2008 Felix Stringer (Frank Bulk-RL) played an April fools joke on us in SL...or so we wished.

Currently the U of S property in SL allows anyone to build on the land. This means the entire property acts like one huge sandbox. This is very inviting for builders in SL to come to the U of S property and practice their building skills (not necessarily a bad thing). However, one of the problems we do run into is inventory items being left lying around the property.

Inventory items can be returned to their owners through a couple of methods. The first is for people with appropriate land permissions to send the items back to the owner. This may be a little tedious for certain individuals having to do this on a regular basis. The other method is for the land to be set to return items to owners after a specific amount of time. This is more than likely the best way to keep the land clean, however before this is done be sure items that are supposed to be on the land are set so they are not returned.

The problem we ran into on the U of S property is that various groups were building structures and organizing spaces. For example Educational Communications and Technology's ECMM building, Kev Juno's College building and Dependent Binder's Art Gallery. All these structures were deeded to their own groups and the property is ran under the SLUG (Second Life User's Group). When Felix Stringer decided to set the land to return all items to their owners after a specific amount of time...all items on the entire property were returned. This included all the structures and objects that were supposed to be on the property. This lead to pretty much the entire property being cleared.














U of S property cleared after inventory items returned back to owners. (photo taken April 3/08).

On April 1, when Felix told us that the land was cleared...we were hoping it was an April fool's joke. He assured us it wasn't and when we went onto the land we saw the inventory returned results. We may have learned how groups and deeds work in SL the hard way but as Slugger Sosa (Rick Schwier-RL) said to me, "But I guess this is a terrific example of life on the bleeding edge."