Group Chat totally down now?

Wow, everyone I talk to is in the minority then.

I actually left a group recently because all of the messages have been "test, is this working?", and of course it never is working. It's a bloody pain in the ass to be doing something like DJing inworld and being constantly interrupted by non-working group chat that stalls everything I'm trying to type till I close down the error message. I've been told to open and close the IM window three times in quick succession to make it stop, but that's retarded.

It'd be nice to see this resolved.

Nika, I think that is just another poorly worded piece of CS/TOS from Our Overlords. As far as I know, NOBODY, not even the West Coast Morons, is proposing to filter chat for adult content. They meant "communication" like classifieds and event listings and (maybe) group notices.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Filtering Group IM sounds like something that could add enough extra resource hogging to be the source of the recent choking of Group IM. Though I haven't tracked it exactly, the Group IM failures seem to coincide with the recent slow implementation of the new Adult policies.

Allowing the options of Groups available only to verified accounts would be the sensible approach and seem the least resource intensive. Too bad LL doesn't listen to resident input.

/me doesn't buy it.

Even if they were filtering group chat, which I don't think they are, it would not be expensive enough to do the kind of damage we're seeing.

Where did this rumor of chat filtering come from, thin air? I suppose anything is possible, but this seems unlikely for many reasons, now or ever.

It came from here:



And also from here:



Therefore showing that according to the current community standards as defined by Linden Lab, you can't even type anything that they consider to be "adult" which can be received by anybody who isn't already verified. This would in fact render the filtering of group IM's as well as person-to-person IM's and public chat, a necessity.

Yeah - no, I seriously don't think LL will be filtering group chat or IM chat or public chat. I mean, LL's new rules as far as adult content could've been written better, but unless they actually post something about wanting to filter chat, I think I'm going to relegate that particular conspiracy theory to the "teens on the main grid! ect" folder.

God I hope so. I've heard it a couple of places now, and on consideration I think you're right ... doing that would be so obviously brain-dead that it couldn't possibly be true.

I was lured by this rumor as an explanation for the nosedive in performance ... I'm left a bit at sea by the fact that although Sardonyx has posted twice on the blogs about group chat (https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/technology/blog/2009/07/01/a-status-update-on-group-chat), he's said nothing that would explain the recent nosedive.

Oh well, apologies if I participated in propagating paranoia!
.

what you are all basically surmising is that in order to participate in group chat you have to be physically located on the Zindra continent, as does anyone trying to also participate in the same group chat.

that makes no sense.

It makes as much sense as Linden Lab's decision to include the word "communication" in the new CS document in relation to "adult communication" without addressing some of the issues created by the actual definition of what communication actually is.

Filtering words simply doesn't work. For that reason alone, I don't think they will bother.

What would work, however, would be to restrict *any* communication between people who don't have compatible ratings. For example, not allow people on Zindra to communicate with people who are elsewhere.

I would expect communication to encompass Chat, IM, Group IM, Inventory drops, Profile views (except I think they are all rated PG anyway), and Teleports (already restricted). I do think they might implement text and voice and inventory blocks.

A harder problem area is scripted objects, which could be owned (or whose scripts could have been written by) incompatible avatars, and which can be used to transmit information (eg. text or actions) between avatars.

There's also the problem of inappropriate URLs being transmitted and opened in various ways in the system.

that is a bad idea and defeats the entire purpose of IM. not every group is about the sexxors you know.

skipping the whole eavesdropping line of conversation...

Group chats are still borked for me. I'm lucky to post successfully into a group IM half of the time.

What drives me nuts, though, is when someone else posts to a group chat, and without even trying to post or open that IM myself, I get the "unable to join group chat" error message. Tends to pop up when I'm trying to build or something and that window gets in the way.

I am hoping that when everyone has upgraded to 1.23, that bug will vanish. Please tell me it will vanish? Lol

As best as I can determine from the Grid Status page, LL does not acknowledge that there has been a problem with group chats for the last several months. However, they did say there was a problem over the last couple of days, but it's all fixed now.

I don't think the problems have anything to do with Viewer releases: it's grid (server/internal networking) problems.

Great - then there's no telling when it will improve?

Thanks for the info Feldspar.

Supposedly, it group chat will be much much improved with the 1.27 server release that is being rolled out to roughly 500 regions today for pilot and then to the rest of the grid next week.

So... watch this space.

Group chat was working excellent while I was in world today. I heard a rumor it was fixed so tried it out...and it worked consistently...

For those who are not aware of it, you can follow the most recent LL status report on group chats here:

http://status.secondlifegrid.net/2009/07/08/post685/

which is part of their "grid status" blog.

Someone mentioned that the Group chat problem may be (at least partially) related to changes made to the grid in the form of server updates. (These are not updates to the Viewer that you download, but rather updates to the software the LL puts on their servers. So you don't have to do anything about it.) Indeed, the top announcement on the status blog is about LL rolling out a server update right now! And the release notes for that server say something about fixing Group chat -- by undoing some change that was made in the recent past.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Server/1.27

I think there was also some kind of networking problem, or some kind of problem with other servers. (There are several kinds of "servers" making up the grid. The ones we hear about most often are "sims", which are the machines that create the land and where your avatar stands, and "the asset server" which has something to do with Inventory. Actually the latter is more complicated than that, but nevermind.) They are rolling out server updates -- that is, sim updates, right now. But they claim to have mostly fixed the problem even before that happens, which points to some other kind of problem - on one of the other kind of servers that are part of the grid.

Anyway, apparently there is at least a two-pronged approach in progress to solve the Group Chat problem.

By the way, Group Chat problems have plagued us for years (well, at least since 2006 when I got here). I know of some large groups (few hundred people) that were simply shut down by their owners because they stopped working right, over a year ago. Groups have always had problems.

For the technically oriented people, who want to imagine what kinds of problems and how this happens: consider that a "Group" is about a disparate set of services, not a single entity in the system. Lots of places where things can go wrong.

All I get is could not start new group chat.. even if I haven't tried .. over and over .. sucks