Second Life Group Listing Changes Are Probably A Matter Of Priorities

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.

Inara’s post links a number of reasons as to why these changes have been implemented, and they sound very reasonable. For example one issue with large groups is that the viewer can sit there for over ten minutes waiting for a group list to load, at which point the user cannot carry out any other activities. Another issue is that full list often doesn’t load anyway. A further issue is that these lists can have a performance implication for group chat and people have long complained about the problems with group chat.

Inara’s post also contains a quote from Oz Linden, which I won’t quote in full (you can find it in Inara’s post). However an interesting excerpt from Oz’s quote is :

it turns out there are a bunch of places in the viewer, where the viewer triggers these requests for all the members of a group where it’s not even going to use the data.

Right there we can see the sort of challenge Linden Lab face with an issue like this. The feature of loading group lists, particularly large ones, is problematic in unexpected places. Linden Lab have taken the decision that for the greater good, they will remove the functionality to list members of large groups for most users, as I explained above, this is going to be problematic for some, but from where I’m sat, it looks like it’s a change that will be of benefit to more people. This of course is not helpful to those who will miss this functionality.

Some of the issues raised, such as not being able to see officers or owners in group list, will be addressed by Linden Lab at some point in the future. They understand this is a useful feature.

These issues should only impact groups with 5,000 members or more. The vast majority of Second Life groups do not have this many members. However there will be pain for groups who do have this many members and people want to see the list of members.

However it should be noted that these changes are part of an effort to improve group functionality for all groups.

Personally, I feel that groups probably should not have listed all members by default, they should only have listed officers and owners. However, when Linden Lab created groups, they would not have been envisaging groups with 5,000 members or more.

The changes are probably an issue of priority for the Linden Lab team and they have decided that removing this functionality is more of a benefit to Second Life than keeping it. Whereas I can understand that some people will be disappointed by these changes, sometimes decisions like this have to be made. Hopefully in the long term, a solution will be developed that will keep most people happy.

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