Robin Linden on Expanding Group Limits

The lobbying effort to get the Lindens to increase the number of groups a Resident can join beyond 25 (as it's currently capped) has so far attracted nearly 800 votes in Jira, Second Life's development tracker, making it far and away the most demanded
feature.  (If you have an SL account, click this Jira link to review or vote on it.)  With so much aggregate enthusiasm, I checked with Community Development VP Robin Linden (above), to see if the company had any immediate plans to implement this expansion.  Via the Lindens' press rep, here's what she told me: "We realize that this issue is important to Residents, especially Residents who utilize groups to run their businesses," she began.  With that acknowledgment, an extended technical qualification followed:

"Group related queries and operations are currently among the most complex of our database operations that happen ‘on the grid.’ The more groups Residents can join, the more complex these queries become-- there are more groups, more group-to-agent relationships, and more ‘roles.’ Because of this, increasing the groups limit could affect the performance of the grid, so it’s something we need to consider very carefully before moving ahead."

So as she puts it, the Lindens want to expand this feature for the community, but it will take some time: "While there’s a significant interest in increasing the capacity to join groups, we won’t be able to put forward a timeline for when this may happen until the potential technical issues have been fully considered. We are evaluating the impact on the back end systems of making such an increase and that we’ll let everyone know if we can't offer the increase, given the potential negative impact on performance."

And as of today, the Jira request remains "Unassigned".

Comments

[Daman Tenk]

Then they should fix the way groups work, if they're really such a problem currently to stability. -_-

Once that get that done, then they can up the amount of groups.

And once we have a stable grid, maybe then they can waste some time on eye candy like Windlight.

[Caliburn Susanto]

The number of groups does not need to be increased. The number of groups one needs to belong to needs to be REDUCED.

The main problem is vendors. They want you to join a group to be kept informed of updates and announcements. This is not necessary. It is possible to broadcast to a list of residents without the group affilitation.

The scripting necessary for doing this should be made obvious and available to all vendors and THAT is how customers should be kept informed.

This would also eliminate one of the more annoying aspects of vending group membership, idle chat spam.

[Uccello Poultry]

Perhaps LL could alter the way existing groups work. For example, I have three titles in one group and I would like to send notices or group IMs to only those in the group with a similar title without those with other titles seeing the message. As it stands now we have had to create additional groups for this function. Now I belong to three groups for just one real affiliation.

[Viajero Pugilist]

If it is accurate that numbers of group memberships affect grid performance, then I’m also all for waiting on this issue before increasing the number allowed past 25.

However, if "Caliburn Susanto" is correct about the existence of another method, currently not being made available by LL, which vendors could use to broadcast updates and announcements (and which is non-lag-producing), then Robin, why don’t you push this solution to take a load off the servers and solve this problem? If it is true, wouldn't it be a no-brainer solution??

I’m glad that LL is responding to Groups issues to some degree…finally. After almost 800 votes on JIRA, it’s nice to hear back. As much as I love and am grateful for SL, Group issues seem to be yet another example of a very long list of very sluggish response times from LL to the issues that residents care about most.

I care about more about a different Groups issue: I want LL to create an option for group members to suppress group IMs (suggested: tickbox "Receive Group IMs") complementary to the "Receive Group Notices" tickbox. This is also a JIRA issue (the second most requested on all of JIRA, with 300+ votes): “Allow Group IMs to be Muted” (please look at this and vote for it if you agree, and perhaps we’ll get some feedback from LL sometime soon…).

There are many varied reasons other people very much want this feature (there are over 50 comments on the JIRA page I have linked to). A typical reason, from “ember coakes” reads "...the ability to mute groups individually allows one to focus more clearly on the community they are attempting to interact with at the time. This is very helpful for those who attend (or worse, host) events in very different communities. Especially if they have both social and work events to attend."

Like so many others, this has been my number one annoyance in SL -- I want to be part of some groups, but don't always need or want to hear the everyday chatter (and have to disengage from what I'm doing to close the box). We simply want to be able to *toggle a mute function for group IM's*. Hellllo Lindens?

The JIRA website itself, as people often note, is *always* laggy, non-intuitive, and very user-unfriendly to non-tekkies (the majority of SL users). Can something be done to make it snappier and friendlier? I would love to see JIRA be used more. I would also love the ability to vote "No" on an issue.

Hello?

[Sered Woollahra]

Jira not user friendly? You're obviously not a tekkie indeed - it's the most user friendly bug tracking system that I have worked with :-))

[Laetizia Coronet]

If there was a way for people to get group titles without the whole underlying group structure - a lot of groups exist only because of the title(s) - then they could join 25 'serious' groups as well as create, say, 5 'frivolous' group titles which tax the system much less.

[zingg akami]

I think groups should be increased for premium members (up to 50 maybe) and reduced for basic members (down to 10). It seems to me being part of many groups should be an extra for being a paying SL resident

[Ann Otoole]

I think if your familiar with double talk then you will have read what robin said and now understand this is not going to be addressed by LL.

the requirements for proper mass communication need to be implemented outside sl and without LL's input. theres a large opportunity here.

Inside sl groups are now nothing but a transient permissions device. not much usability beyond that since they break and malfunction, probably causing grid problems, when theres more than maybe 25 members in the group. if your a mall owner and have a policy requiring group membership then you need to rescind that and pay up for subscribe-o-matic until a real solution is implemented without LL outside of SL.

[Luce Imaginary]

Daman Tenk, you do realize that the people working on Windlight are from another company that LL bought out, a company that only works on those kind of sky effects.

What else would they be qualified to work on?

[Argent Stonecutter]

Communication outside SL is useful (this site, for example, is communication outside SL) but only addresses one side of groups.

Allowing group suspension (directly, as in http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1173, or indirectly, as in http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-288) would resolve the other side.

[Lee Phoenix]

As far as mass communication outside Second Life goes, over the past few months many Second Life vendors and shops have closed their in-world update groups and moved to an outside communication / advertising service called Subscribe-O-Matic. The current list of groups can be found at the group directory here: http://www.subscribeomatic.com/groups/index.

It doesn't require people to join update groups, eliminates chat spam, makes it easy for people to sign-up, and also provides RSS feeds for group notices.

If groups in Second Life are putting a lot of strain on the infrastructure in current implementation, I belive instead of increasing group limits, LL should be focusing on removing as much reasons as possible, for people to join group after group.

There is already some discussion on the SL-Dev mailing list, it seems we will be getting an option to finally control which groups we want to receive chat from - I think it's those kind of improvements that they should be focused on.

Even if the infrastructure allows for a possible increase to, say... 50 groups, that will be far from enough. Most people that are hitting the limit today, will be hitting the 50 group limit in no time, and this story starts from the beginning again.

[Erik Anderson]

The thing is, Linden Labs *is* looking seriously at changing how the group mechanism works, to try to reduce the "back end" impact. There has been a very lively discussion on the SLDEV discussion board over the last week or so on how do it in such a way that the group im behavior people expect and depend on doesn't get changed too badly.

So yes this has been an issue for quite some time, but it does seem to me that they are listening at least...

[Jackie Trappen]

this comment is dirrected to Laetizia Coronet

i think on what you had said non paying SL residents should have there groups down to 10 ummm no thats wrong it should be 50-50 no mater if your paying or NOT we run stores and i have family and friend groups i have to leave just to have vender spots so yea us non paying residents do have what you paying ones DO... shouldnt matter if your paying or not Hope you hear our CALL and make the wise choice to add more groups Robin thankyou very much for your time Jackie

[Solivar Scarborough]

One of the problems I have is I have two businesses in SL: my regular SL style business, 2t (Second Thoughts) which requires a land group, an update group, as well as an expanded land group for the island we're on, as well as belonging to land groups in the various places I have outlet shops. On the side, I'm a contractor, doing work for companies like NMC, for whom I need not only NMC groups, but groups for their various clients so that I can build on the various projects they employ me for. Most of these are private groups, therefore I can't just drop groups and pick them back up as needed, since they require invites. So at any time, just for business alone, most of my groups are booked, leaving very few for just (second)lifestyle groups. In addition, I generally need to keep a few open in case I need to add a group for a project.

[Katalyna Michigan]

Yes the group space needs to be increased.
I work at 4 or 5 clubs and that eats 10 groups alone, because hosts have to be in the VIP group as well as staff for notices.
I own a few businesses and that eats another 3 or 4 groups.
I dj so I have a fan group also. I plan weddings and normally the easiest way to communicate is by setting groups specific to those weddings.

As a member in Second Life that runs several businesses and works for several others. I have realized I do not have enough group space to do advertising, and other things this requires.
The following is my request Increase our group space from 25 to 40 or 50. This, I believe will reduce the count of alt accounts made for "spamming" and advertising purposes. In doing so this reduces the stress on the servers that Linden Labs must maintain.