Group chat improvements

Coming to a new viewer soon .

If I read that right, it will actually kill group chat altogether since you'd have to explicitly indicate you want to see group chatter at every single log-in.

The new viewer will also be mandatory, so if you have problems with the latest main/RC viewer, you still have some time to resolve the problems before you'll be forced to.

Some discussion is currently taking place regarding the "** Group members must explicitly choose to actively "join" their SL Group's chat sessions after they log in." part. Which would be a fairly significant UI change and really rather irritating for those channels which one always wishes to hear from, or be able to hear from, as you say.

Yeah that would be irritating. Sometimes I enjoy the random discussions that pop up. I'd rather be able to permanently opt-out in my group info dialog box.

*nods*

What would really make more sense is to keep the "auto-join" feature, but simply make it an "Auto-join group session" setting in the group window and keep it checked by default for continuity.

And even with all of that a global toggle would still be nice. If you know you'll be busy it would be too clumsy to go through every group and uncheck the setting.

(Still happy they're working on groups at all though )

I am told that there will be a server-side toggle to automatically join a group chat on login; apparently it isn't ready yet, but they still plan to roll out this change. I have suggested that they wait until it _is_ ready.

Less happy now since it's done to "reduce database load" rather than a desire to actually improve group chat . We lost too many features already due to LL's inability to make the grid scale .

I don't think they'll really wait either if that's the reason for the change. If they can get it implemented and tested by the time the server update is deployed then it might make it in, but if it's not done yet, I don't see them holding off just for group chat.

Just a quick question.... does this refer to group IMs?

I think that without this they will have killed the utility of group chat/IMs. Correct me if wrong, this means:

> My landlord won't be able to take informal online polls as to whether we want snow on the ground, because no one will have started up the land group IMs when they log in.

> You won't be able to call in the Forum Cartel group to see if anyone wants to drop by the hangout or come to debug an inworld problem, because no one will have started up Cartel group IMs when they login.

> I won't hear "hey this gig is starting now" from a musician (personally, I can't be bothered to look at events), because I won't have started up group chat for this very occasionally active group.

Am I right?

Oh wonderful more Wonderful fixes that will not solve anything but cause more confusion and problems.

This really makes me laugh. they been saying this bs as they say for a long time. But with rates inworld money being taking out of the UI in the past 1 year + now this? This just goes to show they taking the human factor out of the game. And trying to turn this "JUNK" of a game in to a commerical wonder. Well I hate to tell them,but companies are more untrustable then us paying ( the ones that do pay) are. Why? because companies that spend 1,000.00(s) of rl monies per week. Are less likey to stay around after being screwed and dicked around like what they done to us the users on sl. VOICE THIS BANANA BEAK!!!!!!!!!!! :/

Yes that's what I'd like to know too

Anyone?

Does this mean that if you belong to say 10 music-related groups, you'd have to activate all 10 groups each time you log on to get group messages about events or gigs?

That would be a real pain!

I'm a tad confused as well...as to what this all means.

Personally, there are a few groups I'm a part of that pop-up group IMs more often than I'd like...and the only way to get the 'IM Received' button to go away is a quick double-tap of 'Ctrl-T' --that can get annoying, but it's not at all a con I'm wigging out over.

Even if someone has their groups capped...it wouldn't take too much time to go through (one time) and toggle which ones you want to hear and which ones you want to mute. If you want to un-toggle a group, you can do that in prefs...no biggie.

Exactly Chas....... most musicians will send out a group IM either in their fan group or in one of the main music groups about 10 mins before their gigs start. It's essential to a lot of people as not all gigs show in the events list.

Michael, it wouldn't be a big deal if one could choose to opt-in once and that choice would stick. But from what I'm reading you'd have to do it every time you log on.

For people who use group IMs to remind people of an upcoming event, that would be fairly disastrous I would imagine, since I can't see everyone going through all their groups to opt into group IMs every time they log on.

Well in that case the group owners would switch to group notices to announce events and the like.

You have GOT to be kidding me! Not even considering the loss of using group IM's to announce events and music, but this would also force 40 of my employees to make sure they enable group IM's for internal group banter at EVERY logon?? I freaking hope there will be an override for this, or a default "join all" chat sessions override.

What happens often is you may get a fan group notice about an hour beforehand and an IM (often also in a general music group) about 10 mins before the gig.

Group notices, however, count towards IMs being capped, so I often have the general groups´notices turned off to prevent that from happening. And so do many others.

Also, if every one of the group IMs from a particular very active general live music group came in as a group notice, we´d all be spending the entire evening clicking away blue boxes. With the IM window open I can have a quick look and get on with what I´m doing.

Plus, the group IMs, which do not count towards IM cappping, are a great way to remind people to pop over there and then.

If I am indeed reading this correctly, it´s a serious blow to anyone organising events.

The thing is, if a group gets to be over 100 people, SL gets unreliable. I have around 150 people in one of my groups and I sent a series of important group notices to it a few weeks ago (I was remodeling a mall). To my great frustration and disappointment, I eventually learned that about half the people in the group never got the notices, and were upset when I returned their things to them, even though they WERE in my group and they DID have group notices enabled.

Group notices are already broken and now they're breaking a feature that SORTA works.

Seriously, why in the hell wouldn't they implement this the way group notices are already handled? Just put a checkbox in the group info window of each group that indicates whether you want to participate in group chats.

Half the groups I belong to solely exist for people to say "hey, what's going on?" So you can have impromptu get-togethers. The proposed change is far worse than the current occasional annoyance of unwanted group spam.

Exactly! Besides if (like me) you have your IM window open all the time anyway, it's easy enough to click the ones you don't want to see away.

Is it possible to open a Jira on something that isn't broken yet btw?? (Not that I'd know how to do that......)

Wildfire you been around the lindens long enough to know thats just too easy to do. They have to create a bigger problem so people forget about the other major issues going on.

Capped or not, everything always makes it to your email .

Except when it doesn't ...... IM to e-mail has been borked for me for quite a while now

That wasn't my concern though. My concern is for organisers of events who need to get reminders out in group IM.
Oh well....

And apologies for replying to myself, but just in case anyone is interested........
it seems various protests and such may have had an effect.

"Based on the feedback so far from SLDEV we're reconsidering our plans.
We're exploring several options based on the feedback, and I will post
an update once we have something semi-firm" - Josh Linden

https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2008-January/007644.html