Second Life Group System Still Needs An Overhaul

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.

Groups were built with land in mind and the word on the street has always been that this is the reason for the limits. The argument goes that whenever you go to a parcel, the system needs to check your group membership to see if you can build or run scripts. This therefore creates load on the system and if people had more than 42 groups it would bring Second Life crashing down. I don’t know if this is true but the system does need to check your group membership for land rights.

However, many groups have no interest in land rights. They want to have a group for trading breedables, which requires no land. A merchant wants to send people updates or news, the same for role-play groups yadda yadda yadda. These groups often have no interest in land rights, some have no interest in group chat. People who want to join groups such as this do not care about land rights.

However the system as a whole does. The Group system should follow social media examples for some groups. I have long argued that some of these groups would be better served by a web page of some sort, or something built into the Second Life profile system to allow groups to advertise music events, drama performances, art exhibitions etc. This has the other advantage of not clogging up user inventories with landmarks, notecards, textures advertising products or events etc.

The long term key to the group situation is surely to split groups into group types, only land groups should require land checks for land rights. Groups that require group chat could be a different type of group to land groups and then there could be another type of group that has no group chat and no sending of inventory items.

The group system needs to come towards a more social media centric solution to serve the needs of users, which in turn should mean people can stop asking for more than 42 groups because there can’t be many people who would have a good use case for needing more than 42 land related groups, then people would use a different type of group system for their social needs. Let’s go back to the top of this post, the person who wanted more than 10 groups was complaining because they had :

• 2 land groups.
• 2 Linden sponsored groups.
• 1 resident instructor group.
• 1 group of their own.
• 1 scripting group.
• 3 groups to use for short term projects or other fun things.

So out of the 10 potential groups this person could use, only 2, or in other words 20%, were actually land related. The potential for Groups is held back by this land link.

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