05.06.08
JIRA - Limit Group Notices proposal
Ah, LL drops another bomb reducing functionality rather than fixing the scalability problem in SL. Sighs.
Changes to Groups, New Rules on Group Notices
Edited for Clarity: Sorry for the confusion. The new rules do not prohibit a group from sending more than 200 messages. They do mean that if a group has more than 200 notices stored, starting with the 201st, the group can expect those notices to be regularly removed from storage in the database.
Group messages older than 14 days or in excess of 200 can be expected to be deleted from the database (once each day.) – Katt
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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.
- 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.
- 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.
In short - large active groups with a lot of group notices (say, Fashion consolidated, Live Music Enthusiasts) have an archive of a few days to a week at best now. An archive vulnerable to users scrolling it actively, rather than the purely time based 30 day archive we had before.
I’ve proposed this JIRA to help protect our archives from spamming - Group Notices -> limit number of notices sent by an individual to a set number within a set length of time.
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7083
It would work by simply using the group rules to set the number of notices a person can send in a set amount of time, say one notice per day and per week. This would stop people from trying to abuse the archive and keep most active groups under the 200 a day limit.
So it’s asked. Who the heck reads the group archives? Well! I’m an archive reader, and a lot of people in Fashcon are archive readers. Why do we read the archive?
Because delivery of notices is haphazard at best, a bug that’s going on for a YEAR. Yes, a year. It not only impacts Fashcon, it also impacts the live musician’s groups, Live Music Enthusiasts being just as active as Fashcon, just live music instead of fashion. It can also hit the art community groups as well, which also function similarly to Fashcon.
When things like event notices and search functionality are broken or simply not working optimally (which is a lot more frequent than it should be), the groups serve a valuable service letting people know about events and products they are interested in, in a timely fashion.
Groups hold SL together folks - it is just as vital as search. You can’t realistically have the number of people in a sim that you can talk to over a group chat or reach via a group notice. Without proper functioning groups and search, SL is just a mostly empty 3d landscape. Save our group archives and please vote on the Jira. Thanks 
