Tag: Groups

Inara Pey has recently blogged : Second Life group list changes explained :

Until now, it has been possible to open the details for any Second Life group you have joined and display all the information relating to that group, including the list of members.

However, with the new update, groups with 5,000 or more members will no longer display the list of members unless:

• You are assigned the Owner or Officer role within the group
• You are assigned an ability within the group which requires the members list to be displayed (e.g. you are able to assign members to assigners roles, or are able to eject / ban people from the group, etc.).
• Instead, and until corresponding changes are made to the viewer, all you will see on opening the members list as a message stating “Retrieving member list (0 / XXXXX)” – where XXXXX is the total number of members in a the group.

Inara also provides pictures to exemplify these changes. This is one of those changes that will not raise an eyebrow from many users, but for some, it will be a great annoyance. Examples of the issues that are likely to annoy people can be found in Jira-BUG-9393 : Important use cases for groups have been neutered by the recent changes on the RC channels to member list loading for large groups.

The annoyances listed include :

• You need to find out what role(s) you are in within the group. With the recent change, it is impossible to do so.
• You need to contact an owner or officer of the group. With the change, it is impossible for you to find out who to contact that is within certain roles in the group.
• You need to know what abilities you have within a group. You can’t with the recent change.
• Countless groups in SL function as a “personals” listing of sorts where people can find likeminded individuals for particular interests/activities.

Please read the linked Jira for full details. All of the above is true, but the issue Linden Lab face is whether these changes will be of greater benefit to more people, rather than sticking with the status quo.

Continue reading “Second Life Group Listing Changes Are Probably A Matter Of Priorities”

The issue is an old one,  let’s go back to April 2004 for our first exhibit :

Right now, I belong to two groups to manage land, two Linden-sponsored groups (Mentors and Instructors), a resident instructor group, my own group, and a scripting group. This leaves me with 3 groups to use for short term projects or other fun things.

Surely SL is becoming large enough and complex enough that people are getting involved in lots of projects at once, each requiring it’s own group. We need more groups so that we may participate in more projects. More groups encourage more social collaboration.

The issue back then, over ten years ago was that the group limit was just 10 groups. 10! Good grief. Things changed in November 2004, Haney Linden announced :

For those who don’t read the release notes, we are happy to announce that the maximum number of groups you can belong to at one time has been raised from 10 to 15. Let a new wave of grouping begin.

A 50% increase was indeed welcome but it wasn’t what people were asking for, they had wanted more than 15 groups as back then people recognised that groups were an important aspect of Second Life. However Phoenix Linden pointed out some of the reasoning behind upping the limit to 15 groups :

The current messaging architecture for group membership will not support more than 15. Future releases will allow you to belong to an arbitrary number of groups.

The early Second Life residents had to wait until August 2006 for the limit to be raised again, they were raised with the release of Second Life 1.12 along with other group improvements as announced by Jesse Linden :

• The Group Membership Limit has been raised from 15 to 25 groups.
•  The Group Member Minimum has been reduced from 3 to 2 people.
• With Members, Roles, and Abilities, you’re finally be able to control “who can do what” within a group, giving organization and flexibility for all kinds of groups.
• Group Founders have much greater control over their groups with the ability to stop rogue Officers. Founders can also prevent group land sales, objects being inadvertently or intentionally returned, and worse.
• Group Communication has been vastly improved. A ‘Notices’ tab has been added to the Group Information panel. Simply typing up a message and clicking “Send Message” will get the word out to your entire group. In addition, a single item can be attached to notices. This makes distribution of inventory a snap.

After this the drive for more than 25 groups was on, and it kept going on and on and on and on and .. well you get the picture. Then on January 2011 came the news from FJ Linden :

In October, we committed to increase group limits from the current 25 up to 40 in the first quarter of 2011. As of today, group limits have been raised to 42! To add groups beyond the previous limit of 25, you must be using Viewer 2.4 (or a more recent version). And if you’re still using Viewer 1.23, or a third-party viewer based on Viewer 1.23 code, then you can add more groups in Viewer 2.4 and they will still be accessible when you switch back to Viewer 1.23.

So technical improvements, changes to the group system, changes to the viewer have enabled the Second Life group limit to rise from 10 to 42, is it enough? Well a post on the Second Life forums asks : Does anyone else think we need more than 42 group spaces? The arguments are familiar, they are familiar all the way from 10 groups to 42 groups. The issue is that the group system was not designed to be used in the manner it currently is and therefore, this issue continues to raise its head.

Continue reading “Second Life Group System Still Needs An Overhaul”

Yesterday’s rollback on the Magnum RC channel meant that some potentially decent fixes to large groups were not unveiled. These fixes are designed to deal with issues such as large groups not loading, so you can’t change your preferences etc.

However, Linden Lab seem determined to get these fixes out into the wild one way or another, so they’ve designed a workaround. The workaround includes the sometimes used Snack release channel. This code has been unleashed on some sandboxes, to test the large group fixes you will need to use a development viewer, be a member of the Second Life beta group and visit one of the listed sandboxes. Which listed sandboxes you may be asking, well the full details (including how to join the Second Life beta group and how to get a development viewer) can be found in the forum thread started by Oskar (where you can leave constructive feedback), the thread is here.

However be warned, the reason Magnum was rolled back yesterday was largely due to a bug with llSensor() in the code, that bug exists on these regions.

Continue reading “Take A Snack On Large Group Fixes”