Active general chat group in SL?

Are there any large and active general chat groups in SL? Ones that encourage talking, but not ads or repeating. Largest I saw in search was 50 members. I'm also interested in finding active SL technical chat groups.

The companion question to this is : can I temporarily silence a chatty group that I've joined?

I found one or two such groups a while ago and joined them. But very little chat resulted and some of that was obscene. I don't belong to them any more.

I don't know of any groups like what you describe - hopefully someone else will.

By group chat, do you mean a group IM? If you close the group's IM when you don't want to hear it, you should not get any further IMs from that group during that login. You'll have to do it again the next time you log in, though. (And the next, and the next...)

And I learned something the other night - if group IM starts up and you close that session, you can rejoin the IMs by going to that group in your contacts and choosing the button to IM the group. You don't even have to say anything, it will just reopen the IM session for you. (EDIT: You'll have missed whatever happened while the group IM was closed, though.)

Try the Builder's Exchange. Nice, friendly folks- right amount of chat and help when u need it.

Join Scripters of Second Life and you'll get that in spades. This is *not* a "general chat" group, however, and is kept very strictly on topic about LSL scripting.
-Contact one of the inviters to prove that you're not a spambot.

Advanced Scripters of Second Life is a little more open to discussing programming topics in general, in part because the more advanced LSL projects often require interfacing to other programming languages/servers.

But neither is for general chat or generic help, even of "technical" nature. Both could easily turn into a secondary SL helpdesk if that was allowed, diluting the purpose of the group.

Two of the friendliest general chat groups I know of:

The Forum Cartel
Independent States of Caledon

Yes, OK...they are supposed to have a purpose, especially the Caledonians. But damn, the people in these groups do love to talk, about any and everything.

Fashion Consolidated Cafe.

Forum Cartel chat is pretty interesting and sometimes fun.

Key word here is "should"... Mine likes to keep popping back open.

And yes... the Caledon group is almost non-stop.