[A brief note on pricing changes, which ran long.]

Someone made a good point in one of the groups inworld: "LL made a big mistake when they made only one kind of group, and crammed  everything into it. If they had Land Groups, Social Groups, and Merchant Groups as separate things, I think would be easier. At least, wouldn't be so much hit on servers checking land permissions against groups every time you cross a sim line if most groups didn't have that."

Would it help if they were different types of groups?

Another observation: Currently in one group that is set up as a land group,  we noticed it used to be you could untick ability to rez for the "everyone" role and other roles could have the ability to rez but that's apparently not the case. Any role in a land group is able to rez on the land. Having different group types would be helpful in some cases.

 

[Attn Private Rental Estate Owners-off line Group Notices may be stopping]

Why should we have to go outside of SL to do that, when events are inworld, and the system as it is set up sends an email of the group notices to a person if they are offline, and they've opted in to receive those offline emails? They can opt out if they dont want them. The main reason for having notices going to email for offline group members is so they are kept in the loop about events. 

Discord, well...if you don't mind finding yourself on a zillion servers all of a sudden... I got bowled over with just so many servers and all of them sending out messages etc. and if you don't look at them for a couple of days you've got hundreds of messages to catch up on. I ended up muting most of them because it was taking up too much of my time to go through all the chat to find important stuff. I suppose if they were announcement-only servers that'd be livable. I found it just too much, all the chattiness on Discord.

[Attn Private Rental Estate Owners-off line Group Notices may be stopping]

As a resident I have set my preference to receive group notices in email. I also have gone into individual group profiles and unticked the "Receive group notices" option for those groups that I don't want to get offline emails OR inworld notices from. I tick that option for those groups that I want to get inworld notices and offline emails. Always worked well for me (and yes, I have a gmail address - no problems). I like having that level of control over my SL experience.

Also as a resident, my concern with the Lab removing the ability to have group notices sent to email when I am offline is to do with getting messages capped. I would really hate to miss notices that came in after my messages limit was reached because I was out of SL for a couple of days. I am a member of several very active inworld groups that have private regions, and they frequently communicate with their members using group notices. By taking away that option, Lindens, that's a pretty darned effective way to torpedo our efforts to be part of our communities.

From the POV of a member of a management/organising team for some groups, being unable to keep the community members in the loop via offline notices sent to email when they have opted into receiving them is just making our lives more difficult. We want to keep these members informed, as they wanted and opted in to be informed, so that they can feel they are still connected to their communities even when they cannot be inworld.  It could have catastrophic consequences to all the hard work and effort that goes into trying to build and strengthen our inworld communities.

As regards the SL Events calendar...one of the groups that I help manage has events that are intended only for members of the group. To expect these private groups to post their events on a very public events calendar just won't work for them. In those particular groups, they don't need or want everybody and their uncle coming to their events. Other private groups are more public and more open to it - it should be an available option, and not the only way, to inform these private communities about upcoming participation opportunities. 

I really hope you will reconsider the idea. Good intention, not great execution. I think the effort should go toward educating/reminding the residents (many newer ones may not even know they can opt out of receiving group notices!) and educating them about the choices they have, and also about whitelisting in their email options those offline notices so they don't get marked as spam, etc. I think that's a much better solution, and it will remind SL residents that they do have this level of control over their SL experience, and what they get in their email. 

[Mainland Revamp]

I'm REALLY uncomfortable with the idea of elected officials and all that bother.  Just let people create, with just a few good, basic, common-sense ground rules. I've always liked the comparison to a sonnet - simple rules, with potentially beautiful results: fourteen lines, iambic pentameter - within that structure you can write anything you like.  

We all know the line about beauty and the beholder...

[Third Party Viewer Policy Changes]

You have FREAKING got to be KIDDING me that they are going to just break scripts that show online status - there are a lot of legitimate scripts in SL that NEED this.  

As I was saying to someone - why not have that as a preference (I thought we did?)  where "show my online status" can be set off by default, and let residents decide for themselves if they want that or not?  It's not a violation of privacy if they have to go into preferences and specifically set that on. We're all grownups, we can decide that for ourselves instead of LL going all parental and "protecting" our privacy.   Sheesh.