One-time or annual fee for anyone to have more group memeberships regardless of membership level
karliekarliekarlie Resident
I would like to propose blocks of 10 or 20 additional groups be made available to anyone within SL for a fee, regardless of membership level, so that when somoene maxes out their group memberships, they can add another block of space for more groups, thus removing the hard cap on group spaces.
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Beatrice Voxel
There's a common assumption with these 'moar groups' suggestions that the only real use of groups are for managing chats and notices.
This is incorrect.
Region/parcel access and admin privileges are tied to group membership.
Meaning, the more groups an avatar has, the more work LL's servers have to do to maintain a table of access and admin rights for a given person. Even if that person is not a member of a given land group, there are likely scripts in the region (vendors for specific stores that offer group discounts, perhaps) that DO care about what groups any given Resident has.
This means at an event, while < 20% of the visitors have the event group at all (much less active), every one of those visitors, ~55 people per region, has to have a table of their groups held in memory by that region's processor, on the off chance something will query for a given group. If the region is subdivided into parcels, it also has to use those group tables to verify parcel memberships. It gets complex very quickly, and so adding more groups to a given resident is not a trivial thing.
As noted elsewhere, it might be more efficient for the regions to maintain lists of groups active on the region (parcel ownership, running scripts) and then use those as a test when avatars zone in, so that a small table can be built for the avatar of only the groups that matter in their case. Such a table should be more manageable, and less processor/memory usage per visitor, regardless of how many groups a given visitor has memberships.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Beatrice Voxel I've just come from the other similar topic too and read your comment there as well. So going with both, my naive question: In the case when a group member has no group permission relevant to land at all, couldn't be a null value sent, which would mean no need to request a table of permissions? As most people in most groups have all the land-related permissions disabled, that should already help, right? Also, I hope when a parcel or a region is not on group access only, it doesn't check for land group membership which is unnecessary in that case.
Beatrice Voxel
AlettaMondragon Resident In that situation, you're right. Since the land access table (small) did not crosstab to anything in the user's membership lists, the user's permissions table would be empty.
Jennifer Boyle
Beatrice VoxelFirst, the only thing a script can find out about an avatar's groups is whether or not the avatar's active group is the same as the group of the object the script is in. Scripts cannot find out anything else about an avatar's groups, so how many inactive ones there are makes no difference to scripts.
It seems to me a that a solution might be to differentiate land groups from non-land groups. There could be a single bit that would do this. The server, when looking for land groups, could behave as if non-land groups were not groups.
Fawn Cobalt
ANYTHING that Linden Lab could do to alleviate this MAJOR problem of people not being able to join groups because their group limits have been maxed out would be helpful. Another possible idea would be to give group owners the option to pay a fee to Linden Lab to make their groups exempt from group limits.