Warning! Perms migration bug or feature

I have been having problems editing objects for a couple of days. I assumed that I was just the victim of lag, as it has often happened recently that the system has told me I can’t modify that object for the first couple of moments after selecting something, only for that to change and for modification to be allowed.

So, I wasn’t taking a lot of notice when I started to get the message that items were non copyable, when I had made them and used full permissions textures on them. I just thought I wasn’t waiting long enough for the right perms to pop in. But today I started in the early am UK time, which is usually a good time for building, and less laggy than other times of day. When I looked at the general tab of the edit menu for my objects, they were greyed out, and stayed greyed out no matter how long I waited.

I considered the history of the object - a house - and realised that I had linked it together and then to some no copy climbing ivy that I bought from the Heart Garden Centre. I unlinked it completely a short while ago, because I wanted to make some changes. It is normal for linked objects to include all the perms from the items linked together. If it didn’t work that way then it would be possible to copy no copy items simply by linking them to a full perms object.

Normally, however, the permissions revert when you unlink the object. At the moment that doesn’t happen. So if you make a great house, link it to a piece of ivy with no copy perms set, then even when you unlink the piece of ivy, the perms still seem to stick with no copy.

Generally this won’t matter too much. for copyable items you will have a copy in your inventory even if you rezz it in world. Where it does matter is where you have made an item yourself and haven’t taken a copy into inventory. If you link it to something with restricted perms before you do, you may well find that it isn’t possible to copy it without starting to make it again.

Whether this is an introduced feature or a bug I do not know. It was suggested to me that the change was made to avoid people changing the creator on objects by linking another prim to them… but I do not know if that is right.

Meanwhile, take copies of anything before you link it to something you don’t have full perms on!