Muting a group chat

Hiya,

Is there currently a solution for those who are in a group and do not want to hear the group chat? Can it somehow be muted? It's a shame that some feel they have to leave a group because they do not want to take part in the discussions, then they do not get group announcements either.

Is there a way around this? Or is there a feature suggestion or vote on it?
Thanks guys.

Good question, MadamG. I too would like to know if there's a way to do this. If there is, it's probably something really simple, and both of us can get to feel good & stupid for never noticing it.

A couple of groups I'm in have several hundred members, and the constant chatter can get quite annoying. My usual response is just to exit the IM channel as soon as these things pop up, but I'm always afraid that could be perceived as rude.

If there's a muting solution, I'd love to hear it. No pun intended.

Unnecessarily spamming any group is rude, not leaving early. Some groups are clearly meant as opt-in and social, for example, Live Musicians use the group for notify of upcoming events (and rightly so); Live Help is always sort of busy, helping each other out (and rightly so); it's when people spam groups for their business/event that is completely un-related to the group that I get irked.



Oh, and Chosen, you owe me a phone call!

Regards,

-Flip

If you leave without saying anything, there won't be a 'chosen few has left' message. So no worries about appearing rude.

I had a chat with the Lindens about this a while ago. The answer was that the Group Chat system was very different than IMs and was more closely tied to the oldest back-end systems. For that reason it will take some work to implement the feature. I got the feeling that they wanted to implement it but with their current focus on bug fixes and Group Chat's ties to legacy code we will be waiting some time.

I am trying to finish up my own proposals regarding in-world communication. It is a "fell swoop" change to every facet of non-open chat, everything from voice and presence to messaging and discussion storage. I am trying to prepare as much pseudo-code as possible because I am hoping they would implement a brand new system in the place of existing systems rather than trying to "fix" the way things currently work.

Yeah, what a great question, MadamG.

I've been watching over this one--muting group IMs--for the better part of two years because I know how important it is and how often Resis have asked for it. Past history includes:

/208/28/118191/2.html#post1180137/208/28/118191/2.html#post1180137
/310/74/117900/1.html
/139/bb/113588/1.html
/310/20/118192/1.html

Combined, these have close to 500 votes:

http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=1600
http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=1418
http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=1068

/108/0a/110597/2.html#post1068567/108/0a/110597/2.html#post1068567
/142/9e/109830/1.html
/261/59/84350/1.html#post913702/261/59/84350/1.html#post913702
/108/e7/104428/3.html#post1029702/108/e7/104428/3.html#post1029702
/invalid_link.html <--- chez Robin
/13/ed/82112/1.html#post846766/13/ed/82112/1.html#post846766
/13/ed/82112/1.html#post843569/13/ed/82112/1.html#post843569
/108/94/75378/1.html#post781625/108/94/75378/1.html#post781625
/13/d1/69391/1.html#post719320/13/d1/69391/1.html#post719320
/invalid_link.html
/13/18/45077/1.html
/13/be/2244/1.html <--- 2003 retro stylee!

I'll also add this thread to the project file we have on it!

The current answer is no. The only ways are leaving the group or keeping on closing the windows.

I'm in one group that's marked up as spammy... and in a couple of others where the spam gets shouted at a lot.

I'm in several where I almost forget I'm in them, the chat is so light...

The other thing you can do is shout, scream and rant in the channel asking people not to spam. If it's a spammy group you'll be laughed at... if not you'll probably find a lot of support and things will calm down. They might sneak up over time again, but you can ask people and you'll find there's some moderation of it usually.

I've always kinda worried about hitting close on a group IM due to thinking that message would appear. I just tested this inworld with an alt and found Frans is right. Cool, learn something new every day.

Good to know, I also thought I was going to appear rude, glad to know differently.

Good to know, I also was concerned I would appear rude.

Cool. Thanks, Frans. I didn't know that.

I'm curious though; is this new behavior? I've seen it happen lots of times that someone will start a group IM with something silly or spammish (if that's a word) that people are not interested in, and then the next thing to appear is a dozen "______ has left this session" messages.

These appear to be some malformed links, some of which are corrected here.

If you set yourself to busy mode, you won't get group IMs. That's one of the reasons I'm always 'busy' when I'm on. Just make sure to turn that off if you try to buy anything!

If I understand correcty you don't see proximity chat when you are in busy mode, nor IMs from individuals, nor teleport offers or inventory offers.

It's good to know about the busy option, but it is not the same as what as is meant by folks who want to be able to mute group chat, not even a global "mute all group chat".

Jakkal's use of busy mode, and repeatedly closing group IM windows... are at least partially effective workarounds with varying and potentially somewhat undesireable side-effects. They work, and personally I appreciate being reminded of the alternatives.

I suspect we all would welcome the same thing: a way to selectively prevent group discussion from "popping up" or interfering with our UI on a group-by-group basis. My preference would not be so much to "mute" the chat, but simply to halt visual notifications/pop ups/scrolling text from the group from appearing disruptively in my UI.

I understand that the back end chat mechanisms for IM might be old and creaky. What I don't understand is why "hiding/silencing" the visual updates generated by group IMs is not achievable. What I'm saying here is that much of what I want regarding chat is a change in what the client interface does with it (I.E.: tosses it up on my screen), not so much a complete disconnection from the group itself.

Maybe I'm missing something...

You'll still get chat and IMs, they just won't show scrolling on screen. Open the chat history to see local chat (and IMs if you have IM shown in chat history), and the IM window for IMs. You'll still see the "IM Received" button I do believe. The offers do get instantly refused though, which is why you have to turn it off before buying anything. Object IMs also get blocked, so some items you interact with that send you messages via IMs instead of say/whisper will get 'muted' while Busy.

Trust me, you still get IMs in busy mode. You don't get teleports and any inventory given to you (which is a total pain). I'd love it if we had the option to immediately forward IMs to email instead of getting them while we're busy. They only show the "User is in busy mode" message once too during the IM session if you decide to reply (And it seems rude if you don't).

But yeah you can still get chat if you open the chat history, and you still get regular IMs either way, but it does prevent group IMs.

I don't know if this would be part of such a mute feature, but I'd be curious if there would be a way to mute just some messages in a group. There's a group I'm a part of that I'd hate to leave for the good stuff, but some spamming is tolerated, and that gets to be challenging.

Mari

Do you mean must just some of the members of a group?

For those who haven't seen it, I made a fairly detailed proposal here:

http://secondslog.blogspot.com/2006/02/formal-proposal-revamping-second-life.html

It would reduce the rows in the database by quite a bit, for starters. I've been meaning to put out a revised version including some of the excellent feedback we've received, but haven't had the time recently.

Regards,

-Flip

I don't see anything in Flip's proposal that deals with group IMs at all, did I overlook it?

Also nothing about getting the IMs out of the scrolling proximity chat. I would like to be able to read the chat from the local area without any IMs from individuals or groups mixed in, without having to use the chat history, or quit all groups that chat. I might as well toss in that I'd like to be able to open the chat history without making the scrolling up the screen text go away, so you can always see the incoming chat, even when you are looking for old chat.

Yup - exactly.

(likely 'umpossible', but I hadda ask about it!)

Mari

To clarify: I think what Frans means here is that if you haven't sent anything to the current chat session it won't announce that you left the session.

One thing I've noticed lately that I hadn't noticed before was that I get an IM if someone leaves a group permanently. Has that been a recent change or have I just not noticed it before? In big groups I don't really want to know who quit.

I would like to see the Group IM system overhauled. Selective muting of entire groups would be nice, but there are a few muting bugs still present that may need to be ironed out of the system first.

For instance:

1. I can mute an object and still receive greenspam from it, I can still be given items, notecards and/or landmarks from it, but hey!! any sound or alphas it's making goes away!
   
   
   
   It gets sort-of annoying when I'm in my favourite club and I've muted all the advertisement prims that hand out a LM or notecard...and I still receive the darn thing.
   
   
   
   When an object or person is muted, I should auto-refuse ANY contact from said person/object...be it text, greenspam, LM, Notecard, object, sound, whatever.... I only want to be able to see that person/object there so I don't run into it.
   

Not that I'm completely complaining, mind you....but in fixing this little wrinkle, perhaps they could look at updating the group IM code.

I feel the spamming of a group is put to the Owner of the group or the Officer of that group too ...

And have rules for the group on this and maybe have a 3 strikes your out policy

i hate getting spam all the time when i carring on a seriuos conversation with some one ...

There need to be more control over the groups , i feel if some one makes a group they need to take responibilty for what they have created .... this is my 2 Cents
V-girl