Group Chat

[Paul Hexem]

You know what bugs me about group chat in SL?

Not that it doesn't work, but that LL is screwing up 30 year old technology. 33 years, to be exact.

And IRC has been around for 25 years.

How can LL possibly screw up something that every other company out there mastered two to three decades ago?

[Kylie Jaxxon]

Agree...the same as they can't seem to fix the "keep me signed in" option   I have that option checked at numerous sites for years and have yet had to re-sign in unless I change something...go figure

 

[Fenimore Hapmouche]

Amen to that.

[Jenni Darkwatch]

To be fair, IRC had problems with very large channels as well.

Nonetheless you're spot on. Compared to even ancient tech like IRC, SL's chat is primitive. Then again, IRC clients scripting abilities haven't been matched by many other chat protocols, nor have the excellent channel controls/flags.

[Gino Taggart]

I really need group chat, is there any chance the LL will get around to making this work? There's not much reason to ahve a group if they can't be contacted

[Freya Mokusei]

Haha, nope.

Hasn't worked since they built it.

[Qie Niangao]

On the contrary, there's always hope!

... and in this particular case, I don't think that hope would be entirely baseless. Last I heard on the subject, Simon was making progress on significant improvements to chat.

(Incidentally, for obscure reasons that I don't recall and probably never completely understood, group chat in SL is somehow very different from what IRC and XMPP can support. It's not as if LL never tried those obvious approaches, but they were dismal failures.)

(EDIT: Even more incidentally, there are lots of reasons for SL Groups, completely unrelated to chat. That's part of the problem with Groups: they try to do too many things, so they don't do any of them very well. Thinking of it that way, however, I suddenly wonder if there's anything relevant to be borrowed from Google Hangouts.)

[Jenni Darkwatch]

Just a side note:

IRC doesn't scale well for very large channels. XMPP servers have a lot of performance issues if not tweaked to absolute perfection, and they too suffer from the large group problem. And anyone who ever used IRC will probably remember those lovely netsplits.

One big issue with group chat is getting the messages out to everyone in a reasonable amount of time without getting them out of order. IRC gets around that by not worrying about order. I have no idea what XMPPs policy on that subject is.

(Disclaimer: Former IRC Operator)

I still like IRC's channel management abilities far and above most every other medium. Extensive channel control abilities rock. Coincidentally I'd also love the IRC ban/exempt abilities for SL land and local/group/voice chat, especially moderation flags and such would be useful in many cases. Some of that can be implemented client-side btw.