Naming Your Folders

Disclaimer: I'm not a developer of the Wardrobe nor am I a developer of RLV. I can only tell you what works and does not work for me. -- QuietToday Burner

Because RLV and the Wardrobe addresses folders and not individual items, you will be creating a lot of folders. For example, suppose you bought an ensemble of clothes that includes dress and shoes. If you want to wear the dress and shoes together all of the time, you can put both in a single folder. But if you want to wear the dress without the shoes or the shoes without the dress, then they will have to be in separate folders. I find that I make a lot of folders, so I need to make a lot of folder names.

Now, before reading any further, go back and re-read How RLV Finds Your Items. If you don't completely understand that, then find an experienced user and ask questions until you do.

Let's start simply by talking about the characters you can use in folder names. In short, don't use anything except letters and digits. One exception is described in Setting Up Your RLV Folder. Other than that, your Second Life will remain simpler if you avoid any characters other than letters and digits.

I can hear whinging out there already... I know that some of you really, really want to use special characters in folder names. Here's what I've learned about special characters so far: Deadly: Characters known to cause failure include comma (",") slash ("/") colon (":") semi-colon (";") at ("@") equal ("=") vertical bar ("|") and tilde ("~"). Erratic: Characters thought to act differently in different situations include pointy brackets ("<" and ">"). Sometimes good and sometimes bad: The period (".") is helpful in particular situations, but otherwise to be avoided. Setting Up Your RLV Folder describes an appropriate use of the period. Dealing with Ensembles describes another legitimate use, as does Dealing with Mesh or Prim Clothing. Benign: Characters thought to be harmless include at-sign ("@"), asterisk ("*"), hyphen ("-"), parentheses ("(" and ")"), brackets ("[" and "]"), and braces ("{" and "}").

The deadly ones must be avoided. They will cause errors that will be very difficult to figure out -- for example, putting on completely wrong clothes. The erratic ones are sneaky; sometimes they seem to be OK and then they bite you. So far, the benign ones seem OK, but, of course, I haven't tested every possible situation.

Now, here's another nasty truth for you. Are you sitting down? The original implementation of RLV is proprietary. So every viewer that implements RLV has to re-invent it. They try to make it the same as the original, but there are inevitably some differences. That means that on your viewer, the list of deadly characters might be different.

So I go back to what I said at first. The safest choice is to use no special characters at all in the names of folders.

One more thing... The implementation of RLV in Firestorm (and maybe others) seems to get confused when it finds the word "Top" in a folder name. Sometimes it attaches my clothes to the HUD position named "Top"! I assume that something similar would happen if the word "Bottom" or "Center" appeared in the folder name. So I avoid using those three words in folder names.

For more advice on naming your folders, go back to How RLV Finds Your Items and read it yet again :)

So, here's a summary of good advice for naming folders:

• Don't use special characters, i.e. use only letters, digits and the space character in folder names, except as explained in Setting Up Your RLV Folder.
• Use long, detailed folder names to reduce the possibility of RLV choosing the wrong one.
• Add the date to the end of each folder name in order to decrease the possibility that RLV will choose the wrong one.
• Avoid using the words "Top", "Bottom", and "Center" in folder names.