Tired of group IM spam? Vote on proposals to fix it.

Many people are annoyed by spam in many large groups, but need to be members for occasional discussion, news, product updates, permissions, titles, etc.

Perhaps you've all heard about jira. It's the new replacement for the feature voting tool, and bug reports. there are two proposalks on there which would greatly assist in controlling group IMs. I would ask that everyone go to the site and vote on these proposals. Links are:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-64
Which would allow people to opt out of recieving IMs, and:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-65
which would allow group owners to prevent sending IMs in the first place.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-37
To fix the problem of group notices not appearing to members as they should.

Also, if you are the owner of a group, why not send out a notice informing your members of these. Show the lindens we're sick of this problem.

Note that the problem of Im windows reopening after closing, and giving error messages, has apparently been fixed internally, and will be deployed in wednesday's update.

Some of the large groups I have joined do police spam. At least one doesn't. I left it.

Policing spam is pretty ineffectual really. For the reason that you can't prevent those users from simply rejoining the group after ejection without closing registration.

There is actually a proposal to fix this, too.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-67

Yes, the only real way we have right now to police spam is to close the group membership to the public, so that when we ban someone they stay banned. This is a very bad solution. We really need either per avie banning or per avie muting, (ideally both) and an option for a group member to turn on or off a particular group's chat IM as desired.

All of these are now on jira (many thanks to Honey Fairweather) and I've voted for all of them

Is there allready a built in option for this? i thought there was but i cant find it

What we really need is a way to keep IM's and Group IM's only in the IM window and have them not come up in the Main Chat window


Is there a way to turn off IM's in main window of chat?

Yes, it's in the Preferences. However, it will not keep you from being dinged when a new group IM session starts, and a way to block that is something I'd like to see.

Simply dont be a part of that group thats spamming you its not your channels it the business that made the channel if you dont like it leave you can leave groups that you joined quite simple

I am totally voting for this one.

Issue I think is especially if its new citzen they don't understand why you can't group chat.
Truthfully we do need more ways to connect and communicate with others, yet way groups are set up and discussions are basically often disallowed or when they are allowed often disturb others its pretty much useless for communication purposes. What does the jira vote or propsal plan on doing? Just curious personally I haven't signed up I tried to check Jira out and it was confusing and hurt my head, I decided no thank you I don't need another group, with another password and another thing related to SL to figure out or remember.

Just voted for that one too.. this has been proposed MONTHS ago.. though has not been implemented..

Many of the group related issues are at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-38 (thank you Honey Fairweather).

You won't need to log in just to view them, but if you log in you can vote for as many as you like

I agree.

This issue has come up MANY times before.

Previously raised by :
* Silverthorne Goodliffe : /13/e0/125146/1.html
* Angel Fluffy : /13/0e/112690/1.html (search for 'muting')
* Tre Giles : /13/c7/99564/1.html (search for 'muting')

The following topics have Linden feedback on the subject :
* My Linden Answers thread : /139/65/129722/1.html
* Yiffy Yaffle's Beta Grid thread : /310/74/117900/1.html
* MadamG Zagato's Resident Answers thread : /327/37/138955/1.html

IMHO, what is most important is the ability for group owners to limit "can start group IM session" and "can reply to group IM session" powers via the roles system. I think this is more important than group muting, because this is the only way to actually PREVENT the spam, as opposed to reacting to it after the fact by using mute.

Mute would obviously be good too, though!

I agree that the ability to ban people from groups would be nice.

However, I think that what would be even nicer is a "deposit" option required to join a group.
It would be like a join fee, in that you get the money back if you leave a group. You would NOT however get the money back if you got kicked from the group.
A deposit like this could allow people to join/leave groups freely, without losing any money in the end.
Spammers, however, could end up being effectively fined by this system. That might discourage them from doing it. They could keep coming back (unless banned) but they'd pay a huge amount of fines.
This would be an improvement on the group join fee system, because it would avoid charging normal users permanent fees simply to deter spammers.
The problems with this are that :
* Newbies might not be able to afford to join any groups with deposits.
* Unless this was implemented as a "return group join fee to group leavers?" checkbox, it would require considerable back-end coding work.
* Group owners could exploit the system to scam people out of money by making a huge group with a big join deposit, then, after awhile, kicking everyone out, and keeping the money. To prevent this from happening, perhaps there ought to be another checkbox, enabled only if join fees are treated as a deposit. The checkbox would be "deposits held by LL". If checked, deposits go to LL, not the group owner. If unchecked, deposits go to the group owner. This setting would be obvious when you join a deposit-requiring group, and would serve to help you detect and avoid scams (pointless groups with high deposit and untrustworthy owner).

Angel, thank you for the info, that is interesting.

Since I am trying to keep my group as newbie friendly as possible, the deposit idea won't work for us. However, it is a good idea for certain kinds of groups.

What my group really needs is a way to mute or ban per avie name while still keeping the group open and free for anyone else to join.

We've been lucky so far, for the most part, with chat spam... there have been a few incidents... *crosses fingers*.

Fair enough

I have a L$45 join fee on my group, but I also say in the group charter that anyone who wants to join for free can - they just have to IM me and I'll donate them the L$45 join fee.
Not sure if this would work for your group either, though.

We're past the 1000 mark (in Bisexuals in Second Life) and slowly climbing so it would be too much clerical work to do that.

I closed the group to new signups for a week to discourage a chat spammer and found I lost about 100 members. Since the group had increased by about that amount in the previous three weeks, I estimate I have a huge amount of churn. It would not surprise me if some of that churn was the same people, signing into and out of the group just long enough to check the Notices or wear the group tag. However, even with the churn we experience stable growth when signups are free and open. We also experience slow but steady attendance growth.

Some of the churn is certainly also caused by the group chat, so it should slow down when chat can be turned off by the members.

All in all it's an interesting exercise to watch the progress of a large group that is based on a general interest and is not a commercial club.

I am not thrown by the pyramidal shape of group activity, which matches all things online. If you have an online store, you are doing excellently if your conversion rate is one percent. That is, you make one sale for every one hundred new visitors to your site. I estimate that three-fourths of my membership have recently signed into SL, and of those, about 10% will attend official group functions in any given week. I don't think this is bad - I think it is great! There are some incredible people in the group and it's been a wonderful experience to be in it. I bet we'll double by Christmas, too. Wooot!

The group I implement the join fee on has 1778 members. It isn't a large amount of clerical work to handle free-join requests, because few people read the group charter and thus I get few requests.
I can completely understand, though, that if you want to be as open as possible (not requiring people to read the group charter or have money before they can join) that my strategy won't work in your case.

Yes, I get a few people who can't buy L on the Lindex for whatever reason. Also, I'm still avoiding having a budget for now. We're functioning basically as a non-profit with land and builds donated in kind. If we started having a budget, we'd have to choose between being a business and being a genuine non-profit. The latter, frankly, means I could wind up doing a lot of extra work for free, and I have already lost my RL to SL balance a long time ago, no reason to make it worse.

Growth may solve this issue by finally increasing the number of volunteers to the point that I could pawn off *ahem* delegate the bureaucratic work to volunteers with knowledge and experience of how nonprofits are really supposed to work. I don't like asking too much of any one volunteer; it is not sustainable when you can't always put your virtual world volunteering on a resume and get some cred for it. As long as we're forced to treat SL like a game, I've found that what people can do, myself included, is very limited.