Posted on by Vex

Inventory: The Black Pit of Despair

This is going to be my magnum opus – a comprehensive document of foolproof best practices for inventory management… A living document that tracks The Best Way To Manage Your Inventory!

What to delete:

  1. Ditch the stuff that has no value.  For instance:
    • Bad unpacker scripts.
    • Ads for stuff you don’t care about
    • Hunt prizes for which the builder didn’t bother to remove the dummy prize
    • Bag holding animations
    • Empty boxes
    • Adverts, especially from dumb welcome mats
  2. Ditch the theoretically useful stuff that you can get back for free if you need ’em.
    • Megaprims (use one of the utilities instead).
    • Instructions notecards (I like to past instructions into real documents that I store in my dropbox)
  3. Store stuff of purely historical significance in archive prims.  I do this for old versions of products sometimes.  Script versions are better kept in a source control repository out-world anyway.

Techniques:

  1. When sorting, open up an additional inventory window so you can drag stuff around easily.  Don’t drop stuff on the ground or on another avatar.
  2. Sorting?
  3. Filtering?

Organization:

  1. The sort order of the characters is determined mostly by unicode with exceptions for letters as: !”#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@[\]^_`AaBb…Zz{}~Note that you cannot use space or “|” (vertical bar) and all letters are sorted alphabetically, uppercase first (so “AaBb..”).  Other unicode characters get filtered out if you type them in a folder name. So: Use a high sorting prefix like “!” or “#” to bring folders of stuff up to the top of your inventory and “~” to the end.  I sometimes do things like “#1 TODO” and “#2 WORK” to order.  Vendors: PLEASE don’t put those sorts of characters at the start of product names – it is annoying and likely to cause me not to buy your stuff any more because I might never find it in inventory.

P.S. As a side comment, if you are a scripter, PLEASE don’t write scripts that make a mess of people’s inventory!

P.P.S For further reading:

P.P.P.S. that photo isn’t my house, but a snapshot from the wikipedia article on compulsive hoarding. Apropos, huh?