Delete Group Chat.

[Coffee Pancake]

Group chat is just completely broken now .. 

[13:56] Coffee Pancake: this is a test
[13:56] Second Life: You are the only participant in this IM session. Your message is not being retransmitted or stored.

Some groups are working, for some people, in some locations, sometimes, for some sessions but not all, dependent on the region logged into, maybe .. and then not working for no obvious reason, till they do again, for different people .. 

Why are we even pretending anymore.

Tent pole feature missing so often it might as well not exist by design.

Delete it.

[Sid Nagy]

Yup. It is more a pain than anything else.
And fixing seems not to be a word on the LL work sheets any more. 
It is malfunctioning way too long, just as the friendship request thingy and others.
 

Edited February 23, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Lewis Luminos]

21 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Group chat is just completely broken now .. 

[13:56] Coffee Pancake: this is a test
[13:56] Second Life: You are the only participant in this IM session. Your message is not being retransmitted or stored.

Some groups are working, for some people, in some locations, sometimes, for some sessions but not all, dependent on the region logged into, maybe .. and then not working for no obvious reason, till they do again, for different people .. 

Why are we even pretending anymore.

Tent pole feature missing so often it might as well not exist by design.

Delete it.

I agree. The group chat for my club has been almost constantly broken for about 2 years. I've raised support tickets for it and they've managed to do something to get it working - for maybe an hour or so. Then it just breaks again. I gave up.

We would be better off if group chat was deprecated. Just keep notices. 

[Coffee Pancake]

It might be the final straw that forces us to congregate together in world .. IN GROUPS !!

Just imagine .. avatars! plural! together! talking!

[LittleMe Jewell]

23 minutes ago, Lewis Luminos said:

Just keep notices. 

The delivery of those are mostly broke also, but at least we can get them manually.

[Lewis Luminos]

1 minute ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

The delivery of those are mostly broke also, but at least we can get them manually.

I usually find that the notices themselves arrive but the attachments don't, if you click on them from the notice itself. I have to keep going into the notices list and save it from there, if I want it. 

[LittleMe Jewell]

5 minutes ago, Lewis Luminos said:

I usually find that the notices themselves arrive but the attachments don't, if you click on them from the notice itself. I have to keep going into the notices list and save it from there, if I want it. 

For some groups, I don't get any of the notices either.  I have unchecked & rechecked the box for getting notices multiple times, but for some groups it just doesn't seem to make a difference.  For the free ones, I have even left the group and rejoined, but still no go.  I have to remember to manually check those groups, which is definitely frustrating as hell.

[Emma Krokus]

I too have had problems with group notices not arriving and group chat not opening / transmitting my messages / not being able to see people's responses to my posts in groups for as long as I can remember - even before I had 42 and now 70 groups slots.

Yes, it is annoying to have to manually check group notices - and galling to miss out on group chats, ep. within the builders / avsitter / scripter groups.

I would love for it to work: I don't think meeting in person could adequately replace it (as I am usually doing stuff high up on a sky platform). And just think of all the groups where residents who have never met, help each other out with all kinds of problems.

Discord isn't an alternative for me... I have always liked to do things within world. My preference is to fiddle with prims work while chatting in group.

Maybe groups could work better if the functions just to do with chat and notifications were somehow separated from the other group uses?

[Maitimo]

The problem I think is that groups were originally intended to be a land management tool, not a communication tool. There should have been something separate from them right from the start for communication purposes.

And really, there should be no need for group notices for events - that's what the events listings were made for. If group notices didn't exist and everything was in Events, the listings would be actually useful. And for stores, group gifts etc, there are adequate alternatives in third-party-created tools like Caspervend and subscription kiosks.

[StarlanderGoods]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It might be the final straw that forces us to congregate together in world .. IN GROUPS !!

Just imagine .. avatars! plural! together! talking!

I can imagine avatars together, sure.... but talking? Broke my suspension of disbelief.

More on topic, I never run into those group problems, very, VERY rarely the system will return a message saying that my message didnt go through.

[Sid Nagy]

"It's too time consuming and boring to fix it.
Let's ignore it and concentrate on a new shiny".

That's the adagio and that is why we don't get normal and pretty essential things fixed, but do have the possibility for water in seventy different colors now.

Edited February 23, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Lucia Nightfire]

I now have to use bots to send chat to a transcript database so I can see what I miss because all of my open group chat sessions silently end at random times almost daily now.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-231757

[Sid Nagy]

You still believe in the jira system?
Let me start with the facts about Santa Claus and the tooth feary .....
 

Edited February 23, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Scylla Rhiadra]

9 minutes ago, StarlanderGoods said:

More on topic, I never run into those group problems, very, VERY rarely the system will return a message saying that my message didnt go through.

Admittedly, I don't contribute to group chats a great deal, but do on occasion and, like Starlander, I have to admit that I have very rarely had problems with it.

It's not that I doubt that people do, or that it's broken. I just haven't experienced that much myself.

I wonder if that suggests that the problems might be somewhat localized?

[Paul Hexem]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Group chat is just completely broken now .. 

[13:56] Coffee Pancake: this is a test
[13:56] Second Life: You are the only participant in this IM session. Your message is not being retransmitted or stored.

Some groups are working, for some people, in some locations, sometimes, for some sessions but not all, dependent on the region logged into, maybe .. and then not working for no obvious reason, till they do again, for different people .. 

Why are we even pretending anymore.

Tent pole feature missing so often it might as well not exist by design.

Delete it.

Listen, Linden Lab has only had 20 years to mimic technology that everyone else had working 40 years ago! You can't expect them to get anything right when they're rushed like this!

[Sid Nagy]

But you have to give it to them, the billing system never fails.

Edited February 23, 2022 by Sid Nagy
And now I go to bed, I'm getting too sarcastic.

[Prokofy Neva]

42 minutes ago, Maitimo said:

The problem I think is that groups were originally intended to be a land management tool, not a communication tool. There should have been something separate from them right from the start for communication purposes.

And really, there should be no need for group notices for events - that's what the events listings were made for. If group notices didn't exist and everything was in Events, the listings would be actually useful. And for stores, group gifts etc, there are adequate alternatives in third-party-created tools like Caspervend and subscription kiosks.

Historically, as far as I recall, first there were groups without land, then land was made for sale and added to groups. At first there was this tool called "officer recall". This was supposed to enable you to vote out bad leaders. Except if you grouped your land that you had paid for, members of your group, such as tenants could vote you off your own land. So I and others began to demand reforms. The group tools went through significant reforms back in like 2005-2006. The "office recall" and polls were removed -- it was unfortunate that voting was removed completely. But when people started polls in groups like the Concierge Group of that era, and voted their disfavour of the VAT tax, the Lindens didn't like it. 

Chat has been broken in groups as long as I can remember.  Yet it generally works well enough and everybody chats in them. But if it doesn't work to your satisfaction, there is always Discord. It's too bad there isn't an alternative to broken search in the SL Viewer! Oh, I know, it's TPVs like Alchemy where it works beautifully, producing clean results, 100 per page.

Events listing are so filled with commercials and non-events and it also works so poorly that it would be cruel to expect group notices to be placed by Events. A disaster, really.

Not everyone wants to use the monopolist Caspervend.

Sounds like groups don't work for you. So leave them? That's what I do when the chat becomes annoying and the hectoring notices too frequent.

[Coffee Pancake]

The systemic problem is that there are some truly HUGE groups. This is a real problem and not one that's easy to solve.

Because in many attempts over the years to fix the problem, there hasn't been a single solution that works for all groups from the very small, right up to the mega groups ,, it's been repeatedly deemed that no solution is the correct course of action. Followed by quietly hobbling group functionality for those over a certain size (group member lists) and attempting to reduce the number of groups basic accounts can be in, etc etc.

This mess is made worse with years of content rot and resident attrition. Many active groups are only active because their creators got in early with a good name, said group founders have long left SL so we have to deal with floods of bot spam with no possibility of ever having new moderation.

It's all garbage all the way down.

 

Group chat needs to die. Delete it and never speak of it again.

Limit groups to land administration. Remove them from profiles and search, cap memberships if needed. Remove notifications.

Rename what's left to "Land Management Group", EXCLUSIVELY for managing group land, and nothing else. Cap "Land Management Group" membership to 2 for basic, 10 for premium, and for people already in more groups (all of us), make them leave the now useless groups before they can join new ones.

 

Now we get to define some new systems to replace what was lost.

We need a way to chat with a number of people spread about the grid, lets call these things ROOMS.

We need a way to send notices to lists of avatars for product updates, important news, cake recipes, etc, maybe tie this in with events. These should go to email if offline. Maybe call them ALERTS.

<other exciting new social features here>

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Solar Legion]

Ah yes, a function that was never intended for social uses is having issues ...

The solution is to have a separated system for group socializing while leaving the present one in place for its original use.

That is all that is needed. All. That. Is. Needed.

[PermaRuthed]

Broken group chats are annoying.  I couldn't tell if I'm being ignored or my chat got lost for real.

[CaithLynnSayes]

7 hours ago, Maitimo said:

The problem I think is that groups were originally intended to be a land management tool, not a communication tool. There should have been something separate from them right from the start for communication purposes.

And really, there should be no need for group notices for events - that's what the events listings were made for. If group notices didn't exist and everything was in Events, the listings would be actually useful. And for stores, group gifts etc, there are adequate alternatives in third-party-created tools like Caspervend and subscription kiosks.

I've heard this talking point before and i'm sorry, i disagree with it. I can appreciate that it was not intended for the way it is being used. But it is being used for that. A lot of time has since passed to come up with an actual fix.

fix

/fɪks/

to repeat something.

(You know, in case it wasn't clear...)

One of the latest "fixes" as interpreted by 'you know who' is to severely decrease the functionality of the participation list in group chats. Yes, i'm still not over that one.

 

TL;DR: Even if it isn't intended to be used that way, it is being used that way, so make it work as it is being used. It's not solving world hunger...

[Solar Legion]

Or how about you accept that the way it is being used is the problem.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

8 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Just imagine .. avatars! plural! together! talking!

My avatar can't be in multiple places at once, though. 😔

[Chaser Zaks]

I think you all are giving LL too much of a hard time. LL is aware there are issues and they are around fixing stuff, though there are only so many people that can fix a specific number of issues at once.

A lot of people seem to think the solution is to just add something like this to the code:

bug issue = getBug();
if(issue.exists())
{
  issue.fix();
}

but it isn't that simple.

Second Life's group chats would be, in my opinion, one of the most complex things in Second Life, and when you go to fix it, you either fix it properly or break it entirely. LL wants to do the "Fix it properly" solution, because downtime for one critical feature means overtime for them, as well as an even more upset user base.

Group chat, from what I understand, works as peer to peer, except where peer is a region instead of a user, which means there are a LOT of connections going around. IIRC, it involves the initializing resident's region to tell the simulator "Hey, start a session!", which then asks the dataserver to store that as the current session and get every agent that is online and find the region they are in, and use that to find what simulator the region is on, and then notify every simulator about the incoming chat message. Then every chat message sent to a group needs to be sent to every region(sometimes resulting in over a thousand regions being notified for large groups).

It is a very complex beast, and one mis-step in fixing it can cause the whole thing to collapse.

 

Ideally, my fix to it would be to do what IRC does, and make dedicated group chat servers, which can spin up additional nodes as needed and do load balancing by only having regions communicate with one connection to a chat server, instead of making thousands of connections to many different regions just to send instant messages. But this also involves rewriting a LOT of code, and isn't as simple as just saying "oh well we can take out this circuit breaker and put in a new circuit breaker!". Instead it is more like taking the entire circuit breaker box out and putting a whole new circuit breaker box in.

Edited February 24, 2022 by Chaser Zaks

[Paul Hexem]

12 minutes ago, Chaser Zaks said:

I think you all are giving LL too much of a hard time.

No, we're not.

12 minutes ago, Chaser Zaks said:

It is a very complex beast

No, it's not.

Chat rooms were working as far back as 1980. Countless solutions have even been made open source and freely available. Linden Lab could literally copy paste a working solution, then disable all the existing group chats.

But that would mean admitting that they had to copy paste a solution that they couldn't come up with themselves.