Groups 25 max Why?

I have never been a big joiner and have never bothered to check how many groups I belong to.Until now ,I tried to join a group and am at my limit.No prob this time as I have a few redundant groups I can delete.
I would have thought I was low end,I don't get out much.
How do you guys cope with this small amount of groups.Why is 25 set as the max and is there a reason?

Somehow the group system is not constructed too well, though my technical knowledge of it is not good enough to know whether it could have been done better.

Somehow the system needs to keep a list of all group members, in order for them to receive group chat and notices. The more groups one has the more there is to be kept by the system. My guess is that this is the reason they keep a limit.

This is why more and more businesses move their groups towards systems like Hippogroups. This leverages the number of groups you have to keep because you want to be updated with news. That way you can keep group membership for memberships you really need (like landgroups).

As far as I know it is limited to speed up group checks for land rights and lsl group checks.
Every time you rez somthing return something or even get close to a parcel boundry your groups can get checked if there are group restrictions on the land.

the limit of 25 is there because at some point in the glorious past, when men were still real men, women were still real women, and small pink fluffy creatures from alpha centauri were still real small pink fluffy creatures from alpha centauri, philo linden said "make it so."


how do we cope?

a not-quite-easy-to-untangle mix of hippogroups, subscribomatic groups, and alts.

I guess because I am from a time when the limit was 15 groups LOL I have never had a problem with the limit. I think the most I have EVER had at one time was 7.

But yes I do believe it has to do with load on the LL systems to keep track of everything. Given how much chat lag and failures occur now at 25 I don't see that increasing anytime soon.

I get around the limit for my own group by having a subscribe o matic. Most people are at their limit, and as a DJ who wants people showing up to listen to the tunes, it's important to offer an alternative to the group limit, and the subscribe o matic has worked beautifully.

YMMV.

As for my own groups, I have to restrict them mostly to staff and VIP groups of clubs where I work, so many groups get dumped as I make room for this.

It used to be 15, 25 is a vast improvement.

IMHO, it should be 50.

...and an increase has been asked for repeatedly.. hopefully someday it will happen.

It will take a complete rework of the group system before they'll increase it again. They just have groups being used for too many unrelated things using the same database and data structures.

25 is an illogical number choice.

Given how computers work, it should be one of:

0, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 1024, etc...

I'm not sure how you get 25 in any of those choices...

Same way they got 10M prim max instead of a more logical 8 or 16, I guess.

On the coping part, I tend to swap groups in and out. There are some groups I *have* to be in (land groups, my business group, educational groups where one has to be a member to attend - this one is for a RL school where I study languages, not a typical SL school; I just search events for those classes -, etc. Then there are other groups I like to be in, but if I encounter a group I *have* to be in, I delete one of the *likes* for one of the *musts*.

I also use my alts to join some of the *likes* groups so at least I get their notices.

Blasphemy on you all for asking for more groups!! I still remember the nightmares the last time groups got redone to allow 25 over 15.... and lets not forget not even 2 months ago when groups did not work at all PERIOD..... so bite your tongues before they grant it and we loose our wonderful groups yet again :/

There's no logical reason for numbers stored in computers to be a power of two. For example, does your bank account always contain an amount that is a power of two? Does your telephone number contain only power of two digits? Computers can store arbitrary numbers, and I'm sure you can think of 1,048,576 examples of that

Maybe when it was 15 groups there was a reason (involving a bitmask test in some highly optimized loop), but I seriously doubt that and I bet it was really just that 15 sounded like a good number. Because it was more than a dozen and halfway to 20 (which sounded like a good number). And 25 is "hell, maybe ten more will hold them for a while" after 15.

As someone alluded to earlier, Groups are used for too many things in the system -- several different concepts are conflated. Social Networking and Announcements, and Access Control are the two main categories. At least as early as 2006 I believe that Linden Lab had ("Capability"-based) designs to completely replace this particular mess. I thought they actually implemented some part of it over a year ago.

My guess is that project management resources have never been given to this particular issue, instead going towards Voice, the recent phone-call thing, Windlight, Havok, inventory recovery, Mono, HTML-on-a-prim, Adult verification, and other stuff (including grid improvements like server/network reliability monitoring and database partitioning and whatever).

Thanks for the input.I have whittled groups to 20.I will check out the subscribe o matic thing to see if it suits me.

This will be fixed in Second Life 2.0

25 is just not enough. I have all mine filled with work and family and i can't leave those. There are some i'd like to join but can't due to the limitation. Since they did increase the limit to 25 obviously before I got on here LOL they will do another increase in the future. Shoot I'm good with 10 more groups. Heck 5 more would even be awesome. No no 10 more LOL.

You can't use something like subscribeomatic to manage the groups of which you are member. It's up to the creators of the various groups to decide whether they are going to use subscribeomatic instead of/in addition to regular groups.

Well said. We coped with 15 groups for a LONG time.. and they worked. Group chats worked. They upped to 25 groups and its been mass chaos ever since.


~Brie

/me nods.

One of the Lindens... I don't remember which one, but it was at office hours so it must have Jack, Blondin, Path, Taka, or one of the Doc folks.. confirmed this just recently, that raising the group limit was very difficult precisely because the group system involved too much constant communication across the grid.

Which really is ridiculous. So many of us want more granular communication with our groups (such as the ability to turn off group chat permanently for a specific group, the ability to send notices to just a particular role instead of everybody, the ability to turn off all group chat without killing local chat too), that they could cut down the communication significantly just by giving us that.