LL Blog: Changes to group announcements

All this negativity!

LL are doing nothing on their end and just blaming it on the resi's huh?

Havoc4 - designed (and succeeded) in reducing sim crashes. Has also made sim crossings MUCH less traumatic than before
Mono - intended to reduce the processing power needed to run scripts on the sims, thereby reducing server load.
Windlight - not just flashy stuff, but a major client re-write to try to increase stability (which has worked for me and many others)

Reducing support for older Mac O/S in an effort to refocus their resources on making current O/Ss work better. (After asking us, of course)

So, let's see, in addition to that they are trying to reduce the amount of work the servers do - and are looking for ways to reduce the load by getting rid of stuff they consider less useful.

Groups that are super-active and need to keep track of old announcements should run a blog or something - take it somewhere where it doesn't fill up the SL servers as much.

Honestly, this is going to inconvenience a few people at most and if LL think it will give a decent performance improvement, then why not?

I think it's a good move.

This is part of an economy drive, following on from avatar rendering costs, I'd imagine there's more to come.

Personally I think they need to completely overhaul the group system, many groups don't need land permissions and many groups don't need group notices.

How does something like subscribe-o-matic effect performance?

LOL You know Usagi.. I have left groups that sent more then 3 when I was logged on. If I joined a group that sent 50 or 200 I would go insane.

I think the one that sends most for me is a club..and they send maybe like 15 while I'm logged on and it annoys the heck outta me... Can't imagine 200, I'd end up killing someone!

Havok4 lowers sim crashes (even though I can't even remember the last time I was on a sim that crashed), it has nothing to do with the underlying infrastructure. Sim crashes decrease, everything else stays exactly the same.

Sim load is only relevant to people who are on that sim, the people on the other 14,999 sims won't notice a thing and again, sim load has nothing to do on the infrastructure.

If the sim you're on is lagging, tp to another. If the grid is overloaded, it won't matter where you are in-world, it's put up with it or log off (assuming you could log-on in the first place).

Windlight has nothing to do with stability, it's eye-candy and nothing but that.

Even if you want to argue stability, client-side stablitity once again has absolutely nothing to do with the infrastructure. If the grid crashed because someone's viewer crashes we'd be in serious trouble .

That's really just an illustration of how they have their priorities completely upside down.

0.25% of all residents use a certain old OS so LL puts people to work on supporting that.

Meanwhile 20% of viewer sessions end in a crash and I do believe there are more than 0.25% with older graphics cards or ATI cards where they can't spare anyone to fix performance or glaring bugs.

Even if the Lindens who check support on the old Mac OS aren't devs but testers, they could keep up with JIRA and spend their time repro'ing bugs and importing them which will help far more than 0.25% of all residents.

No, this is how I read it too. If someone really wants a record of all group notices, they can cut and paste to notecards and store those in their inventories, or even in a word program on their personal computer.

QFT, though this Group Notice thing does help a little, like Meade said.

Just to clarify, Fashion Consolidated is about 50 notices a day - I only ever noticed 100 in exceptional circumstances. There's the option to turn these off and review the archive as with any group, which lots of people do. The problem of dealing with this volume is compounded/mitigated by various LL bugs, including offline notices failing completely in the last few months, for *most* people on *most* large groups, but unpredictably. See my year-old JIRA http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1507 for information on this, comments near the bottom: not clear if this is going to be "fixed", but for now the ironic result is that for most people FashCon's traffic appears to be manageable.

It really kind of irks me to see FashCon being sorta bashed for this. For one, they don't send 200 a day, as far as I can tell. For two, I think they do the community a valuable service. Without being able to join more than 25 groups, I'd not be able to keep up with a lot of creators were it not for them. Some people might not be interested in this, and that's cool. They don't have to join the group... but the fact remains that 7000 people did and remain, so it is obviously valuable to someone.

I am in some other groups which do the same thing and for the same reason. One promotes artists and sends notices about gallery openings and installations. Another promotes live musicians and I get a notice whenever a concert is about to start. It might not be your bag, but I love it when I'm bored and suddenly find out someone is putting on a show.

Anyway, I think Honey has done a phenomenal job managing a gigantic group in SL. The group management tools are very limited and she's done a LOT of legwork to manage the group responsibly, including hiring scripters, hiring content managers, creating affiliate groups and keeping a blog to update people. I've been really impressed with the work and talent she brings to SL and really think a lot of people could take a cue from her. Your group might not need the things her group needs, but I guarantee you that nobody could have run a group that big as well as she has done. I moderate a group of 6000 SLers on flickr and have a lot of the same limitations, and I can barely keep up with it despite having four other active moderators. Honey rocks.

Honey also has contributed a bunch of JIRA issues relating to improving the existing group situations, and they are well thought out and deserve some votes.... except a lot of them have PLENTY of votes and are still just sitting there unassigned. It's hard to know LL isn't listening.

What's so odd about it to me is that they're targetting archival and not sending.

I would have little trouble believing that sending a notice is costly (especially for large groups) since you have to see if they're online, pass it on if they are, save to offline if they're not, etc.

But how many people even know there is a notice history? Or bother to check it on a regular enough basis and all at the same time for it to make a significant difference?

Why don't they set a limit on how many Group Notices can go out each day? Like, oh, a nice low number, like 2.

Possibly you would find using the embedded browser less immersion destroying.

So the original Blog posting had

"Groups will now be limited to 200 notices *per group* each day. Older messages, over the 200th, will be regularly removed from storage in the database. There are about 135 groups we expect will be impacted by this limit. The owner of each of these groups should see a message in-world Tuesday, notifying them of the change."


And later came:
"Edited for Clarity: Sorry for the confusion. The new rules do not prohibit a group from sending more than 200 messages. They do mean that if a group has more than 200 notices stored, starting with the 201st, the group can expect those notices to be regularly removed from storage in the database. "



This reminds me that communication doesn't just take a communicator.
It takes a chain of communicators.


Send three and fourpence. We are going to a dance.

So they delete a notice if it is more than 2 weeks old or if there are 200 (or more) newer notices...

That doesn't at all fit with "Groups will now be limited to 200 notices *per group* each day" since "each day" doesn't seem to have anything to do with it.

Or do I still not get it?

I suspect that the "each day" arose from someLLbody saying something like
"We will scan the database each day and delete the oldest notices in excess of 200 for a group if the group has more than 200 notices"

Or maybe that's the kind of thing that someLLbody *should* have said.

Yepyep. The clarified message from Katt says:

I noticed that _after_ I posted, which is why you don't see my post any more.

Now I see why the quoting of the post that was in my browser cache (but not on the host by then) was a tad borky

OK
So what I can do now is try delete *my* post, and add to the confusion

We two can pretend it never happened, and everyone else can do whatever they want to do.




EDIT:

OK Meade. I've deleted my post (that quotes a post-that-can-not-be-numbered).
Which leaves us with another pair based on two postings "that never happened" *sigh*



You delete yours and I'll delete mine?


....... This could be a new form of Thread the never dies ...... where everything but the last two posts get deleted on an ongoing basis.



Edit again:

Ah! But in honour of the communication that gave rise to it....
Everything but the last 200 posts get deleted *each day*




Kewl!

Huh? Pretend what happened?

That's much more clear now. TY, Sling!

Thank you Thaumata, QFT.

I'm more concerned that this will be used to scroll the archive. I'm an archive reader, and a lot of people in Fashcon are archive readers. Why do we read the archive?

Because delivery of notices is haphazard at best, a bug that's going on for a YEAR. Yes, a year. It not only impacts Fashcon, it also impacts the Live Musician's groups, Live Music Enthusiasts being just as active as Fashcon, just live music instead of fashion. When things like event notices are broken (like was announced today) the groups serve a valuable service letting people know about events and products they are interested in.

Groups hold SL together folks - it is just as vital as search. You can't realistically have the number of people in a sim that you can talk to over a group chat or reach via a group notice. Without proper functioning groups and search, SL is just a mostly empty 3d landscape.

I've proposed this JIRA to help protect our archives from spamming -

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7083

Group Notices -> limit number of notices sent by an individual to a set number within a set length of time

It would work by simply using the group rules to set the number of notices a person can send in a set amount of time, say one notice per day and per week. This would stop people from trying to abuse the archive and keep most active groups under the 200 a day limit. Please vote for it! Thanks

Just a reminder that the Blog has been edited to claify, and the simplest explanation of what is to happen is:

"Group messages older than 14 days or in excess of 200 can be expected to be deleted from the database"

So
It's not a limit of 200 postings per day.
It appears that a group could post 2000 or whatever per day, but that at some stage of a 24-hour slot, all but the most recent 200 will get deleted.


But - Here's the thing:

"There are about 135 groups we expect will be impacted by this limit. "

I can appreciate that many thousands of groups could have perhaps small numbers of notices going back to their foundation in the mists of time.
Deleting all notices over 14 days old would probably bring the grid to its knees the *first time* this is run, as megathousands of database records will get deleted.

However, the limit of 200 regardless of age seems a bit strange if only 135 groups will be affected.
LL are not saying that 135 groups post more than 200 notices a day. They are saying that (only) 135 groups post more than 200 notices in *fourteen* days.


Somehow, it seems to me that leaving these 135 groups have all of their notices intact until 14 days after posting can't be a huge database load in the overall scale of things in SL.



Edit to add:

...perhaps simplicity is complicated to communicate

Sling, I perfectly understood the post the first time it was written. First off the 200 limit is a per day limit as well as a total group cap. When you go over it, it will start to scroll off messages from the archive.

My issue is that scrolling can be used to perform a denial of service style attack on a group by a disgruntled member in an announcement group, such as Fashcon, Live Music Enthusiasts, etc - which have a large number of people allowed to send notices and no way to throttle or moderate them, and the nature of online is that sometimes people get disgruntled and do things outside our control. This was not as much an issue before because notices automatically scrolled off after 30 days. (no group has notices stretching back into the depths of time)

as my sig illustrates well - yes, perhaps simplicity is complicated to grasp. Those who have active groups, grasped my issue immediately though, so maybe something will come of it once more of them are aware of the situation and the word gets out.

OK. I see your point.

This sort of connects to the last bit of my previous post, which was:

"However, the limit of 200 regardless of age seems a bit strange if only 135 groups will be affected.
LL are not saying that 135 groups post more than 200 notices a day. They are saying that (only) 135 groups post more than 200 notices in *fourteen* days.

Somehow, it seems to me that leaving these 135 groups have all of their notices intact until 14 days after posting can't be a huge database load in the overall scale of things in SL."


The 14 days might be bearable, particularly if the group owners could eject the disaffected member and zap the DOS notices before the 14 days expired.

The 200 limit seems unjustifiable if only about 135 groups might be expected to bust it - occasionally(?).
There must be many avatars whose inventory database load would exceed the database load of the notices of one of the 135ish groups.

Pedantic of me perhaps, but from the Clarification blog edit by Katt:
"Group messages older than 14 days or in excess of 200 can be expected to be deleted from the database (once each day.)"

So it's not a limit on the number of notices per day as such.
What they now say will happen is that *once each day*, they'll scan the database and hit the >14 days and >200 counts

She phrased it rather poorly:

"Groups will now be limited to 200 notices *per group* each day." means "you have either 14 days worth of archived notices, or at the very least the last 200".

What she apparantly meant by "each day" is that "each day groups that have in excess of 200 archived notices will have it trimmed down to 200 exactly".

You can send 500 in a day, and it might show 300 archived at the point right before the elimination process runs which cuts it down to 200 and at the end of the day the additional 200 will bring the archived notices up to 400 until the next day's elimination process runs.

A very weird way to cap things...