If you watch this forum and the official inworld groupchats, you know that even on a "normal" day, people are losing mroos because they are scripted to check for duplicates of themselves and self-delete if one is detected. Unfortunately, many false positives seem to be returned when this check is run.

The company line seems to be that it's all SL's fault. The mroos are even scripted to blame the Linden Lab asset servers when they disappear. Over the weekend, problems with the Malevay server caused hundreds of mroos to vanish in a sort of Mroopocalypse (preceded, even, by earth tremors at one of the WWoM stores).

Let's examine what we know about self-deleting mroos. Here's an example of the system working as intended:

"Someone filed a ticket about a meeroo they tried to rez and it failed to rez but also didn't return to there inventory so SL asset servers ate it. ... I went to the meeroo home and called it back. While I was talking with the customer ... SL asset servers finally decided to place the meeroo on the grid. Within moments our system seen there where 2 of these meeroos and told one of them to delete itself." [CSR Allatu Augustus in http://www.worldofmeeroos.com/index.php?q=node/2973#comment-10044]

Presumably this would also work should some unscrupulous person manage to create a copy ... surely no one would bother to script a product to delete itself just because too many duplicates are being created by the company's own representatives.

"On a normal SL day if a duplicate happens this system works perfectly as intended, but when the SL asset servers/DB is being temperamental it can trick our system into thinking there is a duplicate when there isn't ..." [CSR Allatu Augustus, in http://www.worldofmeeroos.com/index.php?q=node/2973#comment-10042]

Sadly, a "normal SL day" quite often goes hand in hand with asset server borkage. If this system relies on the asset servers working perfectly on a regular basis, it's already doomed to failure. The current system is perfect if you want plenty of unhappy customers and are in need of something to keep your CSRs busy.

My proposed alternative is simply to remove the autodeletion function. Duplicate checks should continue to be made, albeit the current system seems to be fairly wonky, in that it returns so many false positives. But rather than having mroos self-delete when a "duplicate" is detected, why not store their IDs and check manually once a day? Or are there so many "duplicates" each day that this would be impossible?

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I'm not usually a wall-o'-text kinda gal.