renaming groups

I run a few large groups in SL. I've recently realised that some of them really should be renamed, as their current names do not reflect what they have come to be used for.

I *think* that right now, the only way to rename a group is to create a new group, and invite everyone over, eventually ejecting all non-officers from the old group and *hoping* it dies.

This is really inconvenient, because :
1) without a function to get a downloadable list of members, you have to copy the memberlist of the group by hand, which very time consuming. There's also the problem that in trying to do it reliably many times human error creeps in and makes the process unreliable. I suspect that it is also too difficult to do on Linux at all, due to the lack of copy-paste support in the crucial parts of the Linux client.
2) without the ability to actually *delete* the group easily, you have to wait for everyone to leave or manually eject everyone, which again, is unreliable and time consuming.
3) there will always be some people who no longer use SL, yet who have accounts that remain active. These people hold up the old group's deletion and you end up waiting for them to join the new group, which of course never happens as they're inactive.


Note that I'm not opposed to the money aspect of it. I wouldn't mind having to pay a few hundred L$ to rename a group. I'm fine with that, so long as the renaming process is *easy* and keeps all existing group members, as well as changing all in-world objects over to being set to or owned by the new group.

I realise that many people make groups, and only later realise there is some problem with the group's name, be it a typo, spelling mistake, or simply that the group's purpose evolves past its original name, and it's so much of a chore to change the group's name the change is never done.

I realise that this isn't an *urgent* request, but, if you are working on the group tools right now anyway, then it might make sense to do this at the same time *if* it's easy to do.

It's not about the L$, it's not about the typos, the spelling mistakes or even the ability to easily shut down an existing group.
It's about the difficulty of moving people between groups... the difficulty of renaming an existing group while keeping all of its properties. I realise you may want to limit renaming in some way to avoid people constantly renaming their groups, but permitting renames once a month, say, would be really helpful and save the people like myself who run big, popular groups in SL a *lot* of hassle. So, if it's possible, please tell me how. If it isn't, please let me know if it's planned or not. If it is, some idea of a timescale would be appreciated. If it's not planned, and you have good reasons for not planning to do it at all, please tell me those so that I don't go ahead with putting it on the feature voting tool as I'd probably end up doing otherwise.

Thanks!

If I had a L$ for every time I heard this... Well, not as much as "Can I change my name?" but still a good question.

Changes do occur--one idea, and it's just an idea, but well-worth consideration: it's already been pointed out to us how useful it'd be to exchange group templates (such as a specific Role), making for easier setup of a group. Or to treat group membership in a similar way to exporting/importing an Excel workbook. *Not* saying this is going to happen, but I understand how changes happen... just like RL organizations may change their identity and name, or merge. That's going to be very important when we have more businesses in Second Life that combine, so I think someday from now when this becomes closer to a reality, we'll have your post to cite.

One counterpoint that often comes up: a group that frequently renames itself to grief others, or confuse identities. Similar to changing names, that must be considered.

There will be future upgrades to Groups. Things like this will be reexamined. The current priorities are in getting 1.12 out soon.

So... realistically, what you suggest won't be done anytime near, it's not planned at the present--with so much else going on including QA'ing the new Groups system and making sure there's stability; new features would require even more testing--but we'll leave it open.