As per http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2008/01/robin-linden-on.html and comments in MISC-208, group operations cause an excessive load on the database. This proposal is to allow a user to "suspend" his membership in a group. There are two main variants on this proposal, but they have this in common: suspending group membership would be similar to leaving the group, except that the user would not need to be re-invited or pay a fee to rejoin the group. In the simplest form, suspending a group would simply record the user's membership (including their roles and title) in a new table, and then remove the user from the group. A user would see the suspended group in their group list, possibly in a separate tab or with a flag indicating that their membership was suspended, and be able to rejoin the group with their roles intact from there. A group owner or other group member with the ability to invite users to the group would be able to view the list of suspended users and unsuspend them, so they could manage their membership. Restrictions: you would not be able to suspend membership in a group if you were in the Owner role, or if you had donated tier to the group. The more complex proposal would be to allow suspension, but not all group functions would be suspended. That is, if there is a group function that can be implemented efficiently by looking into the suspended group members table, then that capability would be retained. For example, you might still receive group notices while you were suspended, or you might be able to suspend your membership in a group without removing tier you had donated to it. These two variants are not in conflict: the Lindens could implement the simple proposal and then incrementally restore functionality to suspended groups to encourage people to suspend membership in more groups.