I have huge rental groups, they're businesses. They have customers in them. I make it part of the lease terms that people cannot spam the group and must make service requests directly to officers. Most people adhere to that request and in fact the spam and difficulties in the group are rare — group managers are far too fearful and far too fussy about this problem.

By having the social norm of not spamming or using the group as a sort option rather than the harsh coded yes/no ("like a weapon" as Ordinal Malaprop once explained land tools), then the group is open for *emergencies* i.e. when there is a major griefer attack or SL itself is going down in some major way, people can warn the group and I can push advice and help cards. And occasionally the clueless newb will wander on by mistake and then instantly people steer them to the other groups with the express purpose of help.

So I *want* these groups to be "always on". Especially ones expressly designated as the "help" groups. The topic/social groups I want to be "always on" too. After all, this is social media, it's a platform you come on to collaborate with other people. If you want to be a hermit and build by yourself, go on an alt, or stick on "busy" or work in some offline program, my God, the fuss people make because they hear from other people in this interactive world!

With opt-in for every log-on session (which it sounds like they're doing) I'll have to log on and turn on every single group. The groups already have clutter in them with voice being put into group chat and the voice insertion into SL mandating a reconfiguring of the real estate and the group menu which is already annoying in other ways. Though I've tried to adapt for months with the beta of these viewers, I keep having to miss the mark in pulling up the group to talk — you have to hunt around for how to pull up "groups" or "friends" and then pick out "im/call" which is about 2 extra steps from what it used to be. Also about half the time when I want to open up info in the group to issue an invitation or a permissions toggle, I hit the wrong thing and it opens up group chat and then I myself become a mistaken violator of the demand not to chat in the group.

BTW, I don't need any lectures about adapting as I've been adapting to the gadzillion changes thrown into this software every week for the last 3 years.

People like Joshua Linden making these decisions aren't people who work inworld with the tools to do businesses inworld. They work in the code cave where it's all an abstraction.

I have really come to loathe Voice — it's laggy, it's broken a lot of the time, it doesn't turn on right a lot of the time, I can't hear the avatars even zooming in and even on camera mode, I can't get myself heard, I get lectured by Lindens that I should mute my mike, even after I've pressed the mute button, blah blah blah. I just don't know anybody using it! I use Skype!

And I hate the way it has messed up the menus so that friends and groups aren't the way they were and need more hunting and pecking.

The URL to subscribe is here:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev

If you click on archives you will find the post about the roadmap for 1.19.0:
https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/sldev/2008…

It is a bit hidden in that post though because most of the talk is about weblogin and as the title says: the roadmap.

There is now quite some discussion about this going on and I think the auto-join feature was a result of this. In fact not many people think that changing this with such a short notice in a mandatory client is a good idea.

I would also say though that having a responsive group chat back would also be great and actually would make it usable again. But this means: down with DB load.

(the only question is how much that really helps and this is probably something one can only see when deployed).

Sound great this might actually turn out to something useful and Philips "We will shift from our historical focus on relentless feature innovation to put making and keeping happy customers first on our list of priorities." is maybe more that just words….

But there is another SLDEV for a select group who must be invited and clear vetting hurdles, run by Glen Linden. I'm assuming the discussion took place there.

I'm an assiduous reader of the JIRA and proposals to mute group chat. But none of them take *this* form to my knowledge, whereby you are forced to join each group's chat upon log in. No one has asked for that — they've asked merely to mute the chat scroll after it turns on.

I understand this may be a database luxury. But the point is, no significant community of developers in the larger sense, or JIRA users, or the average group user, has been informed of this "solution".

I agree that what would be better is to have the ability to close the tab, and have it stay close, instead of scrolling text on the screen.

Well, I doubt that there will be as many notifications as chat. And maybe it's even easier to compute all members of the group than the just logged in ones..

Codie