Second Life Bulk Permissions Disaster

Permissions

Permissions

This is a must read for anyone selling products in Second Life. There is a new feature and a bug that may lead you to sell your products with full permission. Several sellers in Second Life have already been burned.

With the release if the SL Viewer 1.23 a new feature was added. The new feature is Bulk Permissions. The feature works in two ways. Until now builders have had to change permissions item by individual item. There is now a feature to allow one to change a number of items in inventory or all the permissions in the contents of an object. First a tutorial on Bulk Permissions (a Torley Video).

Looks great and like a time saver. Problem is it does not always work. When it fails a ‘Next Person’ can get a full permissions copy. Not good. They can sell your stuff or give it away. There are several JIRA’s on different aspects of the problem.

See: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-4444

See: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-273

See: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-5710

There is a fix in testing for the Snowglobe viewer, if you really need this feature. This is beta software so be careful.

See: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Snowglobe

Bulk Permissions – Advanced Permissions

The video tutorial above by Torley shows you how to use the bulk permissions and what they do. There is an advanced set of permissions one can see too. The advanced ones are great for seeing if you have things set right on items for sale. However one needs to understand the basic permissions before moving to the advanced permissions.

See: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Help:Permissions

One can see the Advanced Permissions by opening the advanced menu (Ctrl-Alt-D) and selecting “Debug Permissions”.  This is explained in a 2007 blog post that has now been archived. The URL looks funny, but it is correct.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070113223510/http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=336

The Problem and Gotcha

The problem only seems to affect objects. Things like shirts, gestures and other things seemingly do NOT have a problem. I suggest you still not trust the system. Check your permissions before selling anything.

The problem appears when you take an object from inventory, place it in a package (cube, box, whatever you want to call it) and then change the permissions of an item in Contents, especially if you use “BULK Permissions” to change them. The changes do not always take and in some cases have been known to produce full permissions for the next owner in spite of it appearing OK to you. Not good.

There is a work-around. After changing the permissions, drag the objects back to your inventory, rez the object on the floor and check its permissions. If they are correct on the newly rez’d object then your new copy in inventory is good to use. Remove the object from the package and drag the new copy from inventory into the cube. Whew, bunch to do.

Solution & Insurance

A friend has written a script to check permissions and insure that your project does not arrive full perm and if it does alert the buyer and you to the problem. You have the option to have the script delete the object if it arrives with the wrong permissions (in which case it instructs the buyer to contact you). Once it is out of beta testing I’ll provide information on how to get a copy of the script.

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