The preview grid took an avatar bashing this afternoon when Vektor and Brent Linden organised a mass pile-on to the preview grid. It was the first time I had participated in a formal pile-on as far as I remember, I have been to the preview grids, but not normally when the pile-ons occur. I was in early, building a waterfall and playing with Starax's wand.

We were asked to join the official preview testing group, and the spam commenced. People worrying about their inventory, others telling them off, people complaining about the people complaining. I crashed. When I came back the sim seemed to have rolled back - from a fully finished waterfall with rocks etc, I had two prims left.

Vektor Linden proposed some tests in the preview group, and so they tested dropping inventory on people. The difficulty was that there were three settings -- from memory, OK, decline and save attachment. Clicking OK seemed to decline the inventory, which seems a bit counter-intuitive. Some people got both, some neither and others one but not the other. I have no idea whether that was misunderstanding the tools or bugs. There was a lot of group spam shooting up the screen at a rate of knots.

The next test was for Vektor to make a proposal, but although a number of junk proposals had come over the group for decisions, Vektor's never turned up. We then had a clicking session on refresh in the group members' page, and it semed to be over.

I went back to building my waterfall, and the textures which had displayed perfectly well seemed to have gone back to grey. And stayed that way for over an hour before I gave up and replaced the prims.

I had a few oddities with the land I bought in preview. I bought four parcels side by side and yet couldn't join them together into one parcel. When I tried to terraform, it was allowing me to terraform parts of the parcels and not the rest, but I couldn't see any real reason for that. When I tried to terraform a whole parcel it told me terraforming wasn't allowed in Morris although I was in Oak Grove.

When I crossed a sim border I got that message that my teleport couldn't be completed in a timely fashion, even though I hadn't tried to teleport. All in all very strange. Hopefully there will be time to deal with these things before 1.12 is rolled out on the main grid.