Increasing the Group Limit vs. Making It Work

I just got a group IM to sign a petition to increase groups to 50 http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/doublethegrouplimit/. I do not think more is the answer. Adding to the mess that is our SL interface is not progress. We need to restructure these tools and make them work for us (groups, Inventory, notecards).


Two changes would make groups work; Groups need to be set up to have sub-groups and we should be able to have groups ARCHIVED that we hold on our SL web accounts (since we can access groups via the internet now). We could read the group news there(I have not thought about what we do if a archived group notice has an attachment and we want to grab it - I am sure the programmers can resolve this issue).

I feel this way we have near unlimited groups available to us, we can display the groups we are currently dealing with and 'activate' groups from archive as we please.


Please discuss.

Interesting. To be honest, I have never once accessed groups through the web interface. Nor wanted to. I need all of my groups active, or I wouldn't have them. With the exception of maybe 2, and those are for product update notifications. The moment they are 'archived', they stop serving their purpose for me, since I won't automatically get notifications. That's their purpose to me.

I think the key isn't necessarily more groups. It's more refined types of groups. Let's take a step back and look at why people use groups. There are two main reasons that come to mind to me. One is for land management (letting your friends rezz on your parcel). Another is for communication (announcements from your favorite SL musician about concerts, for example).

My understanding is that the overhead caused by groups is in large part due to the land management aspect, as every time you enter a parcel, SL has to determine if you are allowed to be there, what rights you have to rezz, run scripts, etc. If we could pull all of the non-land-affiliated groups out of our profiles into some other structure, would 25 then be enough?

For LL to create "clubs" or "affiliations" or whatever that only contained the communication-oriented aspect of groups without the land aspects would be a considerably smaller development effort than making groups as they stand work from a processing load perspective. If we want something that's going to solve the problem, it's going to have to be something that's not terribly hard for LL to implement, or they'll never get around to it.

Anyone else with a bit more database background than I do can probably tell which of these ideas we start kicking around are "easy" or "hard." That's going to be the difference between "do" and "not do" for a LL development effort, I think.

For Merchant groups I found a box that allows you to Leave the group but still place your things under the group name.

Could save a couple of groups, I havent used it yet I only bought it yesturday but when I saw it for 100L$ I thought what A Great Idea.

Here is the first part of the card.

"The Grouping Box
From CR Designs by Chavo

Thanks to the Grouping Box, you no longer have to stay in a given merchant group to keep your stores up to date. Put out a copy of the Grouping Box while you have the merchant group for the store you're at active. Once that has been done and your grouping box is set to the group for that store, you no longer have to remain in that group to put out new items. "

Good for anyone has a lot of shops in different groups.

Justa.

Very interesting.
I once found someone had joined the group for the mall I manage. This person placed articles for sale in the vending area. One box was very large and covered the UNPAID rent box which I found because the hover text was showing. I asked everyone with group add abilities if they knew anything about this. No one knew a thing. Needless to say I sent IM, no response and ended up returning the items.
While this is a very useful tool for merchants to use in an honest manner, it is also another tool for the dishonest.
Mall owners and managers, watch your spaces.
I always tell my vendors that I will be happy to re add them if they need to change their display.

I make a similar item-grouper box. While it IS possible they could be used to continue placing objects without the mall owner's permission, the answer is for the mall owner to return all the tenant's objects using the About Land requester.

One bugbear about those boxes is that, as far as I know, they don't work on land where a group role other than "Everyone" is required to build - because although an avatar can have a non-default role, a scripted object can't. This hurts other objects that might need to rez on group land in a similar way, so allowing objects to inherit the owner's role would be useful.

I have never understood why there is a limit on group memberships at all - assuming that the SL database is normalized, there should be no need for any limit. I believe the original reason for the 15 limit was a social one, as with the original surnames (originally only a certain number of people could have each surname and the available number was based on the psychology of the number of acquaintances a human can keep track of - or something like that, anyway). But that was when groups were assumed to be actual social groups of friends whereas on current SL they're often treated more like mailing lists.

What I would most like for the group interface is an option for open membership groups to allow new users to choose which role they want to join as, and then better filtration of notices by role (so that, for instance, notices could be sent to all staff or all customers, but not the other group).

Increasing groups is NOT the answer when it comes to updates and communication. Using a system designed for updates and RSS feeds is the answer.

http://www.subscribeomatic.com/

These systems are a good idea, but..

First - they charge a subscription fee - I know they have to do that because of the hosting costs, but still. This is also a "tragedy of the commons" situation, because you pay the subscription fee to save your customers from having to join your group, but the customers then use the free slot to join another vendor's group, and that other vendor gets all the same benefits without having to pay.

Second, they aren't as well integrated with the client as Group Notices are - even if they have a nice HUD attachment, the user still has to remember to wear it, and has to keep re-wearing it every time they change their avatar, unlike a group which they join once and then are members forever. Also, subscription systems are much harder for naive SL users to understand, and don't have the trust that comes from being embedded in the LL client.

Third, they don't have the corollary benefit of groups, which is that your brand becomes advertised on people's profiles. If someone sees your store name in the Groups of a friend whose profile they'll look up, they might decide to go and take a look at the store - I know I've found places that way, and others have found me that way too. In fact, a Group is even better than a Pick because Groups appear right on the front page on the profile!

Well, according to this
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/01/robin-linden-on.html

Groups do drag database performance down.

Robin Linden: "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, why should the rest of us take even more of a performance hit so that vendors can advertise themselves via groups?

Agree with Isablan. If groups are that hard on the system, why worsen it?

Because with millions of people from all over the world here - we need these groups to manage to keep communications open and clear with our many concerns in SL. Offline groups is like receiving a newsletter - a good solution to having too many ACTIVE groups and negatively impacting Sim performance.

/me agrees, too..

I would have been nice for a Linden to update the JIRA issue, though. This has far, far more votes than anything else open in JIRA right now and I don't see any Linden comments in it.

I like the new non-group-based subscription systems, and the ones I belong to don't require the members to wear any hud. You just join and then get group notices. If members miss a notice, even one that has a gift, they can go to a store kiosk and get it from the History.

I think that for the major vendors, who don't rely on group memberships for in-profile advertising, and whose groups are so large that group IM spam is a horror show, this is a great option.

It's the Lindens' system! If groups are hard on it, they can make them softer. Or, for example, why not embed an RSS subscription system into the SL client - with an avatars' feeds listed in their profile, so as to not lose the advertising benefit? I imagine that most creators would have no trouble creating a free blog somewhere that provides RSS and then pointing customers to it.

I appreciate that subscribe-o-matic is trying their best to solve the problem, but there seem to be significant downsides to it and their business model is not ideal. For example, for someone who sells a single product and then provides continuous customer service and updates for it (which is common with scripted items), by their fee structure if I have had 500 customers in the past, I have to pay L$2990/month indefinitely to continue to support them, even though the customers have now finished paying.

How do you get them, though? You can't get them _as_ group notices because that would require you to be a group member.

My guess is that you'd get them through IM. Are there any statistics on the database load of multiple scripted IMs (compared to a group notice)? I know that llInstantMessage has a throttle, so there's presumably some issue there..

Why, just the other day they were planning on making it so you have to manually join group chat each time you log in, to try to soften some of the group load.

I get them as object IMs, and sometimes there is a nearly-simultaneous object or notecard given.

I always understood that llInstantMessage's 2-second delay was to prevent it being used for griefing. Don't know of any load-related issue per se, tho certainly the delay does do some ad-hoc load distribution if a single object is IMing folks from a list. As far as raw IM load goes, I would think that group notifications, being so infrequent, would be a small percentage of the IMs being sent at any one time.

I would rather get a e-mail stating that one of my archive groups has a update notice. Then I could click the link and read it at my leisure.

I had to subscribe my alt since my main keeps on loosing Subscribe-o-Matic "notices".

It suffers from all the downsides of IMs and inventory transfers (get a notecard or texture while you're offline and you'll never know unless you know to look for it) and if you ever set yourself as busy you miss any attachments sent.

It also lacks an easy way to check the history (you need to tp over and even then the history is optional at the owner's discretion), a blog beats an in-world subscription system any day.

if ll set up something that allowed me to set up rental plots without needing to use groups that would be just grand and 25 groups would work.
as it is, i need scores of groups for rental plots.

The 25-group limit hurts estate owners who insist on being part of the tenants' groups, and large shop owners who rent space in many malls. It leaves almost no space for social groups. I mean, crap, I own 4 groups and 2 of them are landholding groups. Most of the rest of the groups are informational groups for stores. These could benefit from subscribeomatic, as I am also part of Indyra's and Last Call's subscribeomatic groups. Although one way to make the existing limit work better would be to be able to select recipient roles when sending notices. This way club owners and other large organizations that have staff positions could send notices to just staff without spamming the VIPs. It would cut down on at least one extra group.

What I think would be nice is if the Lindens could tell us what particular group operations take a lot of database time, to see if we can have mini-groups that don't support the more intense operations and in consequence don't count against the 25 limit.

For example, land rental "groups" don't particularly need group chat. Business update "groups" don't particularly need group chat (other than notices) or land management. Neither of them particularly need to allow residents to view the list of other residents in the group, which is probably a fairly database-intensive query.

But then, I'd also like it if groups could enable the old Live Help chat facility, but I've been told that's impossible

Hmmm I signed this petition. well groups aren't only for rental or groups land. When you make a roleplay on a sim you need often to join some groups and the limit of 25 is really fast out. If you need to join other groups than RP you can't.

See it to believe it. From what i heard llabs is not even going to talk about it.
If they do wonderful! But if not well thats a rabbits life

While I agree - Linden would probably argue that we already have subgroups, in the form of group roles.

I would argue in response that the current set of permissions on roles prevent us from using them to their full potential. For example, if I don't want certain members of my land group to be able to drop objects that avoid autoreturn, I have to make a seperate group for that. If I want to limit who can IM the land group, I also have to put those people in a seperate group.

Admittedly though - prior to group roles being introduced, we had to maintain 6 different groups for the Shelter. Now we're down to three - but it'd be nice to be down to one.

When Linden first rolled out the group roles in 1.12, they indicated that it was only phase I, and more improvements to the roles would be forthcoming. Almost 2 years later, I'm still not seeing that happen.

I hate the subscribeomatic. I love to wear skins from one skin creator but they use the subscribeomatic system and I'm seriously starting to think I should stop and switch to a different skin creator. It is very frustrating to not be able to see past notices, and especially annoying that there are "free" stuff for group members . . . if you can find some box and use the LM found within it. This is what is sent through the subscribeomatic - "use the LM in the box to get the free skin; but not the LM attached to this message." Two months now getting this messages and not seeing whatever it is they are talking about. I sent a notecard asking what the deal was. They accepted it. Then ignored the question. Yes, I think I will need to switch skins. Very frustrating.

And I must say again: I really hate that I can't see past notices with the subscribeomatic.
hate it hate it hate it

And I need more than 25 groups, and I need them active not archieved. Only one of them involves land management.

Oh, and there are other uses of groups besides land management and communication. On other that immediately comes to mind is family groups.



2) HUD attachment?
3) Yes, I am always examining groups I find in other people's profiles, and looking at their picks, and looking at their classifieds.



Store kisok? The only one I've ever seen just allows me to unsubscribe or subscribe.

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I will note that the skin creator has already lost money from me, as I was going to buy their discounted store cards, probably the most expensive one, but I couldn't get myself to get that bad feeling to leave. The "bad feeling" created by the subscribeomatic. So that is about 9000L - 10000L or so they lost from me.

And yes, I do spend that much at times. Dropped 10,000 to 15,000L on Last Call the last couple of weeks.