There has been a bit of a hoo-ha going on about Linden Lab throttling llGiveInventory to 5K per hour per owner, per sim. as explained in Jira-SVC-7631. This sounds like a reasonable limit at first glance, it sounds like an even more reasonable limit on second glance when you consider that a single script couldn’t do this before the throttle anyway. However the ever inventive users of Second Life have got around this limit to allow subscribers to send out announcements quickly. This has unfortunately exposed a security flaw that had to be urgently addressed.
A few things stand out here, one being why the hell do we need to send thousands of notecards and textures to people in the first place. Another, the issue of communications, in this case I’m with Linden Lab, they needed to address a security issue but there remain communication issues. This change will break content.
Reading the Jira, most of the concerns are from people who run mailing lists, there is one major exception in the shape and form of 7Seas Fishing creator Seven Shikami whose game uses llGiveInventory. However it’s mostly about mailing lists, with people concerned that if they use a large mailing list that hits the throttle, all items in a sim owned by them that use llGiveInventory will not work for a while, that includes any scripted vendors that use the function. I don’t know what would happen if the vendors used llGiveInventorylist instead, I’d imagine they’d still be throttled.
However this really highlights a flaw in the group announcement system, delivering inventory to so many users for an announcement, when really we should be just pointing people in the direction of the notice. Google + and Facebook both allow people to create pages for their business or communities, it’s time really to move group notices to the Second Life profiles website and implement this into the viewer. This would mean that instead of people having to have yet another landmark, notecard and texture in their inventory, they’d just follow the link to see the texture, be able to teleport from the link and see detailed information about any new product launch or event.
I’m not suggesting this is easy to implement, but it is surely time we stopped loading up our inventories with notecards, textures and landmarks for one off announcements. Group pages could allow for more richness when announcing events and releases, people could provide feedback on the page, testimonials, for others to see, the advantages of going this route are many, of course there would be bandwidth costs here and of course instant messages are throttled and are capped, but really if you’re planning an event and a product release you should be planning ahead, group chat can be used for last minute announcements.
The current system wasn’t designed for the sort of load on the servers that mailing lists currently create, huge groups with thousands of members weren’t envisaged back then. Yes Second Life has evolved and will hopefully continue to evolve, new challenges like this are a positive but really it’s time to look at the whole thing again.
There are always going to be communication issues, I’d like to see more Linden Lab staff following the lead of the adult content forum and posting links to user group meetings in the forum. Oz does a fine job in the server forum of posting links to rollouts. Kelly is active on the scripting mailing list but I’d like to see more from the scripting team in the scripting forum, even if it’s just posting minutes to their user group meetings. When it comes to group notices, which are what subscribers are designed to address, there are still going to be people who ignore notices, you can’t make people read the information, but I do feel that pages will offer a way of reducing some of the issues, enhancing the richness of event and product release notices and save space in people’s inventories.
I really like the way we can post snapshots to our profile feeds and add locations inworld, I’d like it even more if I could post a texture on a group page and add a location there for people to read about events, I’d also like to be able to post events on this blog in the same way as I can post destination guide links, I really like the way you can just create an ad widget, yes I am getting greedy now and yes Linden Lab do have more important matters to deal with but I feel there are long term benefits to be had here for everyone.
Yes! I’ve been advocating web groups for a while already and I am happy to see you also support this idea. What I call “web groups” would be a great improvement for communication and promotion in Second Life, so much could be done with them. Did you ever read my post on this topic?
Linden Lab has the best social tool and doesn’t know it? – Fiery Red http://bit.ly/otlKJp
That’s a great post and yes building tweet features into the current structure would be very handy, trying to keep up with the various social networks is a bind.
However the really good point you make, that I didn’t touch upon here is that people outside of Second Life can see this content if we move groups to the web and that can pique their interest, that alone makes it worth the effort.
I’ve always felt that land groups and communications groups should be separated. There would be no need to limit the amount you could join if it was web based and used only for communication and announcements.
my.secondlife.com would be the logical place for this. A web-based groups tab could be added to your profile page inworld where you could check for updates and post comments.
Agree with you completely about communication groups and land groups, I’ve thought this for a long long time, the two requirements are quite different.
A weaker version of this is the Feeds.
If you follow a feed, you get regular updates from that person, if they regularly update their feed.
People -could- start making things to ‘subscribe to my/my announcer alts feed’ – and that would handle much of this.
But an events section in your profile might also be handy – though the real reason people use ‘notices’ is a belief that constantly spamming someone gets their attention…
– It can, but not always, and can be counter-effective if it gets the wrong attention… Marketers use email lists very effectively, but also work very hard to make sure they segment mailings based on receiver interests…
Which could bring us back to profiles. Imagine if I could use make Feed entries that would be sent to people who subscribe to my feed, but I could then limit that based on what interests they had in common with me.
So you might subscribe to my feed and be into Christianity, and another person be into reggae. I could put up a feed, and check the ‘segment’ option, then segment it to just reggae people…
Yup constant spamming gets tiresome and I can’t be alone in seeing some notices and thinking it’s more spam and not looking at it, when it might be useful!
I’d like to see it more inworld, if you follow someone you only see it on the profile site, i’d like to see notifications about updates come inworld, but that might take us back to the spam problem!