Today's SUG (Nov 12) was dominated mainly by a discussion about the upcoming llGiveAgentInventory function, which allows creators to specify a path name relative to the root directory for new items to be received at.

This Canny post is meant to provide a place to discuss the subject further.

The key takeaway the Lindens need from this is that many users are HIGHLY opinionated about how they organize their inventory, and they'll be dissatisfied with any solution that requires them to depend on creators to know where things belong; otherwise it's like leaving everything you've ever bought in the packaging, with the receipts, etc.

: Finding automatically-placed folders

Automatically-placed folders will get buried. Is there a way to prevent this from being annoying?

- Option 1: Allow a history view of recently-received items. (My suggestion.) Firestorm already has this, but its organization is as a filter over the whole inventory hierarchy. It would be better as a list of the basenames of recently-received folders provided by llGAI().

- Option 2: A mandatory container folder for items received via llGAI(). Move the target for newly-received marketplace items into a subdirectory, e.g. |Received Items|Marketplace, and put llGAI() items in sibling like |Received Items|In-World. This would also be an opportunity to relocate inventory items obtained through other means like buying objects, llGiveInventory(), llGiveInventoryList(), etc. The |Objects system folder has been doing double duty by accumulating these items stuff the user has picked up manually. I don't like having my creations mixed in with my purchases, and I think a lot of other residents feel the same way.

- Option 3: Allow a "Save As" style dialog box for users to choose where to put stuff when receiving items. (Nyx Onyx's suggestion.) The path provided to llGAI() becomes a default recommendation, not a reliable outcome. This also solves Problem 2...

: Users disagree with creators over organization structure

- Option 1: Iexo Bethune suggested a forwarding mechanism: if a user moves an intermediate folder (e.g. "|Clothing|Fashionista Fashions") to a new location (e.g. "|Clothing|Maitreya Clothes|Fashionista Fashions") then it would be neat if the viewer could remember this as a path rewrite rule, and redirect stuff in the future. This was misunderstood by the Lindens present as a request for folder symlinks, which would probably not be what Iexo wanted (as it would cause more clutter, not less.) Of course, there are challenges with this strategy, at least in the example given—What if Fashionista Fashions makes clothes that aren't for Maitreya? Additionally these rewrite rules would need a whole UI to manage them or they'd silently accumulate... which is not great.

- Option 2: Tagging. Several people mentioned this, and it is already discussed somewhat on another Canny issue, here: https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/add-custom-tags-to-inventory-items - doing it properly would mean abandoning or downplaying the current hierarchical inventory organization structure in favor of non-disjoint item sets. This would solve the problems with Option 1, since now the creator name would be just another tag to apply to an item. For a bonus round, tags for marketplace categories could be added, automating some of the more common uses.

- Option 3: The "Save As" dialog again, as proposed by Nyx Onyx. This way the user always knows where things went. However it could be annoying if the user has just received a huge collection of new items and must decide where to save each one.