Ordinal Rants Against Chat Lag And Group Chat (Updated)

Steampunk inventor Miss Ordinal Malaprop has an excellent rant against chat lag, the aggravating phenomenon where local chat text displays seconds or even minutes from when it's typed. "[T]o be quite frank the practice of Building and Scripting and General Creation is a solitary one," she writes in her inimitable Victorian diction, "and I am not by nature a particularly solitary Person. I am certainly not an astoundingly Social one, but I do both require and enjoy the company of my Peers." Her solution is to prefer SL communications conducted on group Instant Message channels, where delays are not as frustrating, or socially vexing. (Or for that matter, can be conducted whilst airborne on a flying umbrella.) I share her pain; chat lag is one of the many reasons I steer interviews toward IM; then again, group chat tends to overwhelm you in a barrage of text. Maybe all this partly explains why so many SLers are taking their conversations out of Second Life, and onto Plurk. Image credit: Miss Malaprop's Flickr stream.

Update, 5/16: In Comments, Miss Malaprop suggested I mal-interpreted her post: "Group Chat in SL does not Work - it is Broken and Lagged to an unusable extent... It really should work, for the sake the Psychical Health of all Sorts of Residents, or we shall become maddened, ranting twitterers without social outlet, ensconced in our skyboxes and shouting at plywood." I have updated and amended the headline accordingly.

Comments

[Rez Gray]

I hate to take advantage of SL's faults in order to plug my own products, but I /might/ have a workaround. It's mainly a workaround for Group IM (which sucks). It's called GridTalkie. It's basically an object-to-object radio that works anywhere across the grid. You can find out more in my profile or via shinybrand.com

It might not be much of a fix for local chat lag, but in sims running smoothly (avg. > 35fps) it works pretty well. :D

[Seven Shikami]

Wow. Other way around, here. We run "7Seas Social Chat", for fishers to chat live with each other. 1,783 members at last check and the lag is THICK on that thing, with frequent message drops or multi-minute delays. I've never had much trouble on local chat, by comparison.

[Ann Otoole]

Some people have switched to non LL resources for communications for security reasons.

[Samantha Poindexter]

I fear you have misinterpreted Miss Malaprop's entry. In-world group chat is exactly what she is complaining about, not what she sees at the solution.

[Opensource Obscure]

What Samantha said.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

Yes, indeed, I was in fact commenting on issues with group chat rather than local - mostly, apart from in a few cases, local chat works perfectly well, and indeed Instant-Message-Remote-Chat does too if one is not involving too many folk at once.

The issue arises, though, when one is ensconced in one's Workshop at a High Altitude, engaged in some Work that prevents one from joining folk on a Local Basis, yet requires Social Diversion in order to prevent the Encroachment of Insanity.

Still, my sincere thanks for publicising the Issue, regardless! It is one that certainly does need Linden addressment.

[Hamlet Au]

Well count me confused, Miss Malaprop, you wrote "I despise Chat Lag" up top, then after offering several examples, conclude, "Therefore, Chatter within particular Groups is essential". I took that to mean you preferred that over local chat.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

Yes, it is essential, and the problem is that it does not work.

[Hamlet Au]

Then should I re-appraise this missive of yours as a General Malediction Upon All SL-Based Chat?

[Ordinal Malaprop]

The important points are that:

1. Group Chat in SL does not Work - it is Broken and Lagged to an unusable extent;
2. It really should work, for the sake the Psychical Health of all Sorts of Residents, or we shall become maddened, ranting twitterers without social outlet, ensconced in our skyboxes and shouting at plywood;
3. The combination of the above two circumstances is a Bad Thing.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Indepedent State of Caledon group chat lag...on SLunday, is a Spectacle to Behold.

I swear, the Lindens ought to just migrate group chat onto internal IRC servers and integrate that somehow into the client, because it would probably work better than what they're currently doing.

[Viorel Daviau]

Actually, there was a time when Group chat worked wonderfully...before the Lindens "improved" it.