Adventures In Programming - My Most Recent Epic Fail

I play Second Life (a virtual reality game) a lot, and yesterday someone asked me to remake an old project of mine from way back, an alt detector.  Alts in Second Life are when a player logs in multiple avatars at the same time and pretends to be different people.  A lot of alt users use their alts to cheat on contests in Second Life, and that's why I created my alt detector.

My original alt detector was designed to work like a normal contest board in Second Life.  It knew when people where using alts and it simply didn't let those avatars join or vote in the contests.  I was letting someone else manage the business side of selling my alt detecting contest board so that I wouldn't have to do any marketing or promoting.  Unfortunately that person ran the business into the ground and stopped playing Second Life.

So then the other day someone asked me to make a new alt detector, and I thought that sounded like a fun project so I agreed to make it.  And it was fun to work on, I stayed up all night scripting that thing.  I worked out all the little details of how it would function, so it would do all the things it needed to do, and scripted it all out.  I did a lot of testing, found bugs, fixed the bugs and all that.  This time instead of making it a contest board, I had made it simply ban alt avatars from the parcel of virtual land.  That way people could use whatever contest board they wanted to use and do whatever kind of event they wanted to do, and still be free of alts.

Then morning came and my new friend logged back in again.  I told them they had perfect timing because I was just finishing up the alt detector, and I gave them a copy of it so they could test it out too.  They were so happy to get to try it.  But then...

The next thing I knew, they were instant messaging me back saying that something was wrong.  They said my alt detector had banned them from the entire region of virtual land they were on.  The region was an island and there was nowhere nearby to send them so their avatar was just bouncing around in the air, unable to move or do anything.  Not only that, they said they weren't the only ones who my alt detector had banned.  They told me the owner of that island region was there when it happened and they had gotten banned too.  Apparently my alt detector had gone mad and decided that nearly everyone was were alts.

Can you imagine, almost everyone on the island being thrown into the air all at once?  In my mind I thought of that movie The Terminator and how in the movie a military artificial intelligence had decided that all humans were its enemy and started launching missiles.  I had to get there and shut down my creation quickly before it wrought havoc on even more unsuspecting players.

I asked them to teleport me to the place where the alt detector was, but they couldn't get me there because they weren't there anymore, they were in the sky.  "This is bad," I said.  "No shit," was their response.  Then they told me that one of their friends had somehow been allowed to stay, apparently they were the only one who the alt detector didn't ban.  So then I got a teleport signal from their friend who was somehow still there, and I went to see if there was anything I could do.

...And there was absolutely nothing I could do.  I couldn't delete or return the alt detector because that copy didn't belong to me, it was my friends copy.  I couldn't remove anyone from the parcel ban list because it wasn't my land.  The only thing I could do was look at the ban list and see how much time was left on my friends ban, they had about 2 hours before it would let them come back.  But luckily the owner of the island only had about 45 minutes left on their ban time, and when they were allowed back they could un-ban everyone else... of course that's only if the alt detector didn't just ban them again as soon as they came back.

This had to of been the worst bug I had ever made, even worse than the time I tried to make something that could receive chat from every chat channel in Second Life and instead ended up crashing myself and then crashing again every time I tried to log back in, that went on for weeks, but this was worse because it wasn't just myself this time.  I began to wonder how long this would go on.

The player who had sent me the teleport signal (my friends friend) was still there, and out of the blue they asked me if it was okay if they returned the alt detector.  I was stunned!  They could have done that the whole time??  I said, "yes".  And then a moment later the alt detector was gone.  I felt so dumb.  But now that the alt detector was gone there was hope, only about 45 minutes left and then the island's owner could come back and un-ban everybody.

Talking it over with my friend I realized that the thing that caused all the problems was that I had forgotten to include any instructions.  They had set the alt detector on the ground and expected it to just work, and because I didn't tell them how to use it properly it rebelled against them.  All it came down to in the end was one little option in the Second Life preferences that I had enabled and they had disabled.  With that option enabled the alt detector worked just fine, but for the players who had that option disabled the alt detector couldn't tell who was an alt or who was a normal player, and it thought they were all alts... my bad.

The moral of the story: Communication is very important.  Sometimes a thing can work perfectly for you, but if you don't tell someone else how to use right it then it might not work so well for them.