Tags
ban, community, group, land, Linden Lab, management, rights, suggestions
I bet Linden Lab is dealing with a deluge of suggestions through the new submission system right now. It’s like popping the cork from a bottle of a good Spumante wine. Second Life residents have been suggesting improvements for years without much of a sign from Linden Lab that they ever listened. This change is a much appreciated one and a further confirmation that Ebbe Altberg is committed to improving the communication between the company and its users. Kudos to Ebbe and all those Lindens who pushed for this change internally. My only remark is that I wish Linden Lab considered creating a submission system like uservoice.com, where people can vote and comment.
So, after a first suggestion for web-enabled groups, here are some more. As managers of a federation of groups as the East River Community we have a good experience in dealing with issues such as group rights, users and land management. From this experience we submit a list of improvements we wish we had so to facilitate the chore of managing an articulated community such as ours.
- Please, let me edit the group name.
- Allow owners to kill a group.
- Add a note field for each group member. There is a need to add some information about group members.
- Improve the interface of the group box. Why do we need to work with such small boxes?
- Increase the number of group roles.
- Increase the length of the role tag.
- Allow a group manager to ban a user over all land owned by a group. Currently if a group owns a vast amount of land on Mainland split in many parcels, a banned user must be added to the ban list of each parcel. When a group owns tens or even hundreds of parcels this is a management nightmare.
- Allow land management rights to more than one group. Say, a role-play community may have more than one group associated to it (a group for residents, one for managers, one for security) and all these groups need some rights over the community land. As it is today all these different actors must be added to the group owning the land and this is a real problem with the limited number of group roles we have. What I suggest is to have a more fine-grained system so that I can grant a subset of rights to additional groups over the main group’s land.
- Allow to issue land rights by parcel to a user. A fairly common case for communities and estates is the need to issue rights to residents on a single parcel. In the case of our community, sometimes we give banning rights to trusted residents who rent houses in the community. However, we would prefer to issue this right only for a single parcel rather than the whole community land. The same applies to rights such as changing media streams, parcel descriptions, etc.
What is your experience with group and land management? Do you have more suggestions?
Lelani Carver said:
I would *love* if groups had a web-enabled RSS feed that could be read in an app like Feedly. I could dump all the group announcement slots, and the dozens of dozens of group announcement emails that I delete each day could go bye-bye. I’m in the process of turning off group announcements, but sad that I’ll miss out on some good informaiton if I don’t happen to be inworld looking at group IMs. Some of my groups may have their own forum or wiki or blog, so for the important ones I’ll now be searching for alternative news sources that have their own feeds.
Indigo Mertel said:
I agree 100%, Lelani. I am in the same boat and had to disable notice delivery for several very active groups. The whole communication system in SL is primitive. We are continuously hit by group notices and notecards, to the point that we simply don’t read them anymore. At the same time it is very difficult to have one’s voice being heard. This is also why I mainly rely on the web to diffuse information on my community.
However, having to rely on external services creates a separation and we can reach only a small percentage of the SL community. With the web being the pervasive and powerful communication tool it is, it is ironic that SL is the only environment where we can’t fully leverage its power. It’s hard to understand why LL is underestimating what a powerful promotional channel web groups could be for SL.
I hope you’ll submit your suggestion on a RSS channel. The more we show to LL that this is an important matter, the better.
Lelani Carver said:
I aleeady have, and blogged on my main site and my WordPress.com one as well. I am hoping that the group improvement suggestions will be a popular suggestion.
Next suggestion: upvoting suggestions