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Collection box

What lands in the collection box, why it lands there and how players get it out.

The collection box is where anything the plugin could not hand over goes. It exists so that no item and no payment is ever lost, no matter what the player's inventory looks like or whether they are online.

/ah collect

There is also a Collection Box button in the main auction house menu.

What lands there

Reason shownWhy it is there
SaleMoney from a sale that happened while you were offline
ExpiredAn item from a listing that ran out of time
CancelledAn item from a listing you cancelled, or that an admin removed
Inventory FullAn item that had nowhere to go at delivery time
ShutdownAn item recovered from a sell flow that was interrupted by a server restart

The reason is available on each item as {reason} in COLLECTION.PAYOUT.LORE, see Menus.

Money payouts never appear as items in the box. They are deposited into your account automatically the next time you are seen, with a chat message saying how much you got.

Why it exists

The plugin's single hard rule is that an item is never destroyed. Some points in a transaction cannot be undone: once money has moved and a listing is marked sold, the item is owed to the buyer whatever happens next.

If at that moment the buyer has a full inventory, has logged out, or the server is going down, there is nowhere to put the item. The collection box is the answer to all three.

Flow diagram showing an item taking one of two paths after a purchase, straight into the buyer's inventory or into the collection box when there is no room.

This is also why the plugin recovers items at shutdown. If the server stops while a player has an item sitting in the sell menu or is halfway through the chat price prompt, that item is written to their collection box before anything else is torn down.

Collecting

Click an item in the collection box and it goes into your inventory. The menu reloads so you can see what is left.

Each item can be collected exactly once. The claim is a single conditional database update, so two clicks in quick succession, or two servers on a network trying at the same time, cannot produce two copies.

Automatic delivery

You do not have to remember the collection box for money. Payouts are delivered automatically:

  • when you log in
  • when you run /ah
  • when you run /ah collect

Items still need collecting by hand, because the plugin will not force them into an inventory you may want to keep clear.

On a cross-server network with CROSS-SERVER.SYNC.PAYOUTS on, a payout created on one server is delivered the moment you are seen on any server, rather than waiting for your next login on the one that created it.

Configuring it

The menu is the COLLECTION block in gui.yml. Its buttons are PREVIOUS-PAGE, NEXT-PAGE, RETURN and COLLECT-ALL, and the lore appended to each owed item comes from COLLECTION.PAYOUT.LORE. Remove COLLECT-ALL from CHARS if you want players to collect one at a time.

The messages are COLLECTION.* in your language file:

KeyWhen it is sent
COLLECTION.COLLECTEDYou took a single item out
COLLECTION.ITEMS-RECEIVEDPending items were delivered to you
COLLECTION.MONEY-RECEIVEDPending money was deposited
COLLECTION.INVENTORY-FULLSomething went to the box instead of your inventory

The LISTING-COLLECT entry under SOUNDS plays when an item is taken out.

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