Rooke Ayres

FYI:

Hot off the presses: Per the Official LL Blogs:

Changes to Groups: New Rules on Group Notices ...

As part of our ongoing effort to provide you with the highest quality Second Life experience possible…we have identified and tested an issue that should help alleviate load on the databases.

:: 1. Starting Tuesday, 6 May, 2008, all group notices that are older than 14 days will be removed from storage in the database. (Notices were previously held for 31 days.) The reason for this change is to help reduce load on the database. Note: Nearly *every* group that uses notices in Second Life will be effected by this change, which will be ongoing.

:: 2. Groups will now be limited to 200 notices *per group* each day. Older messages, over the 200th, will be regularly removed from storage in the database. There are about 135 groups we expect will be impacted by this limit. The owner of each of these groups should see a message in-world Tuesday, notifying them of the change.

Please note that in both cases this process would remove the *oldest* notices, if any. This will start on Tuesday 6 May, 2008, and is intended to help stabilize the databases.

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I'm not sure what the effect of this will be for people that control large groups or send a lot of notices. The first person that came to mind was Sarah ( Love those Freebies! ). Is anybody else going to be affected (good or bad) by this?

Any remarks, comments, good, bad, eh, meh, phewey?


(btw, this has been a public service announcement)

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Dnate Mars

Makes sense to me.

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Travis Lambert

135 Groups send in excess of 200 Notices per day???

Damn... glad I'm not in those groups!

Ten

Wow, that's, um, really fucking awesome for Fashcon.

Jesus christ, Linden Lab finds yet another way to fuck groups.

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Joshua Nightshade

I'm so happy.

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Sobriquet Kryakutnoy

Yes, it's going to kill FashCon

Not sure how they will cope. Maybe they can move to designers submitting updates to an active officer who will consolidate everything into an hourly notecard or something?

Though notecards would only be able to contain text and images, no objects, yes?

Perhaps they will have to move to subscribe-o-matic or another web-based system.

As it stands I imagine tons of groups like FashCon are going to suddenly see a massive rush of notices every night at midnight SLT. Which I'll bet is going to extremely tax the asset server

EDIT: So as not to be misunderstood, I have no idea if/how Honey and the other Fashcon people are planning on dealing with this new restriction, these are just my personal musings on the matter, as FashCon was the first group that came to my mind which would be effected.

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beee-dooo.

Darien Caldwell

Great...

But really, if a group is sending out that many notices a day, they need to move it out of SL anyway. A mailing list would be good. Email can handle hundreds (thousands?) of messages a day. And best of all you can archive and be selective on what you view. Even allow HTML and/or attachments if you want.

Bams

There's groups that send more than 200 notices in a day?

Psyke Phaeton

You didn't join the "FreeAsianPornWinACarViagraFreeBiggerPenis" group?

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Chalice Yao

Holy..

groups have been sending over -200- -notices- per day?

Um, that'd be 8.3 notices per hour. Or
roughly a notice every 7 minutes. And that's the new limit, groups have been going higher. What the -hell-?

Seriously, if groups like FashCon have been sending that much..they really need to get a mailing list done. Better archiving, better searching, independence from LL comms, images in mails, added SLURLs to click, links to blogs that are copy and pastable.. and it won't stress the heck out of the network. Sending a group notice to all members every couple of minutes throughout the grid? They need to be send to every damn sim a member is in (remember, people have only one connection to SL, and that's the current sim). I guess often enough several times. For that to happen, database lookups need to be done for every member's location and online status, before sending each targetted message that needs to make its way through the routing of the LL network, and those groups probably are the opposite of small. And those people cry about bad grid performance...

In their defense tho, LL should make it clearer just how much effort each kind of communication, rezzing, lookup etc. actually means on the system. It'd open some people's eyes for things they just don't get told.

Eata

Obvious problem, notices are trying to be used for two different implementations. They were designed for infrequent "message of the day" style updates but a lot of groups use them as a constant stream of status updates.

They should keep notices but also add a new kind of message, something more like RSS Feeds. So you have tagged types of messages and group users can choose what kind they recieve so you can be in whatever group and still get the important announcements but opt out of the hourly DJ messages.

Briana Dawson

I have a friend with a club that just opened so she invited me into the group. They had a 12 hour party, with notices going out 2-3 times an hour. I left the group by the 7th hour of the party. Building with constant group notices popping up bites and when it covers your very needed inventory window at the same time, it bites even more.

I cannot fathom the need for 200 group messages in a day.

Support for Healing gave off about 4-6 while i was on yesterday and that alone annoyed me.

Why can we not just turn off group notices and be done with it? Even better, send group notices to Local Chat, automatically declining attachments. Oh that just gets my giddy.

detrius

I love that option.


...now, if LL could add a "mute"-function for group chat...

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Rooke Ayres

I agree with Chalice...

My wife gets Fashcon notices all day, and I don't think even they send out as many as 200 a day. Maybe two or three an hour at most.

I don't think the fashionistas or most anyone else have anything to worry about this non-event - although I have to wonder what in the world is being sent around by the 135 groups that will be affected.

Kristian

Fixed.

Walker

I've never heard of Fashcon.

Vaelissa Cortes

It is the most annoying group ever...I have had "recieve group notices" off and sometimes recheck it on and then back off just to make sure, the group is also not listed in my profile, yet I still get a billion notices a day. Wonderful feature indeed :/.

Kristian

My female alt was in it.

Imagine signing up to be hit with group notices constantly. It's like that. At least it's not the goddamn french. My femme has a very french sounding name and gets french group invites constantly.

Ten

Actually, THAT option doesn't work for me. I get the notices anyway.

Lucifer Baphomet

Fashcon..

Its an acronym

Fascist convention.

Its a cover for white power/ neo nazi groups, and they send coded messages via notice.

Cristiano

Wow, and I thought Twitter was obnoxious. How can anyone handle that many notices? Notices wouldn't be so bad if they faded out on their own like EVERY SINGLE IM PROGRAM THAT USES NOTICES, but you have to click on the goddamned thing to get rid of it. It is one of the more poorly implemented UI features in SL. The fact that it does not even pay attention to the setting to not receive them is just icing on the cake.

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Vaelissa Cortes

I can't .

Ten

A lot of the notices are pure shit, Cristiano... the kind of stuff you'd have found back when flexi prims were still coming out and people were using the interface template for cutting textures to fit the avatar instead of using photoshop and alphas.

I don't know why they allow that kind of shit... it's rather archaic.

Brig McD

200+ a day? Dayum!!! That would annoy the bejeezus outta me. I don't want to hear from the groups I'm in more than once or twice a day. If you're a club, send one notecard with all that days events. If you're a store, send one notice listing all the new items and sales. Anything more is overkill. At least IMHO.

Wildefire Walcott

I think it was a fantastically poorly-worded blog post. I'm 99% sure they meant that they would be pruning the group notice cache on a daily basis, so that any groups with more than 200 notices cached would be trimmed back to 200. (In other words, it's not an automatic thing, but a process that runs once a day, like group funds distributions.)

Chalice calculated that 200 a day means a notice every 7 minutes, and no one would stay in a group that active. (Notices count against offline IMs, don't they? I know group invites do.) Frankly I wouldn't stay in a group that sent 200 notices every 14 or 30 days either, but that's just me.

The real groaner here, though, is that once group membership exceeds around 75, notices only reach about 50% of group members who have notices enabled. Notices have been severely broken in this manner for ages. This, I reckon, makes the group cache pretty important- so it's too bad they're cutting it back.

I wonder something, though- I heard that the reason we have a group membership limit (once 15, now 25) is that every time your avatar moves, SL recalculates whether you're supposed to be where you are based on the land's group settings. This results in a huge amount of database activity (I mean, it literally happens every time you move), and going beyond 25 groups would noticeably impact the database load. This is a very subtle thing that I might never have thought about if someone hadn't told me. Could there be some similar, sort of hidden issue associated with the group cache that LL is trying to address here? (Because really, how often do you open the group notices tab?)

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