I run a medium-large group called Fashion Consolidated which has become a vital resource for in-world commerce an ever-growing list of vendors (currently 160) and buyers (currently 570, increasing 10-20 per day). Many vendors report significantly increased sales via this group, so its importance for Linden should be high. The reason for this bug report is the serious problems with notices that are very seriously affecting group performance and utility. Many vendors from my group have submitted individual reports to support, but as the focus and owner of the group, I would like to submit a request for high-priority consideration of this group, whose existence is threatened by this.

Problem:

Very often a notice submitted by an authorised group member will not appear (popup) for the group's members.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Click Notices tab in group
2. Click Create New Notice
3. Prepare, attach and send
4. Very often no notice popup occurs for any group member, although it clearly appears in the notice archive.

Reproducability:

Unpredictable, but feedback I am receiving and personal experience teaches me "often" - perhaps 50%+ of the time. Many vendors have submitting the same notice multiple times with little success, as evidenced by my group's archive.

As far as can be ascertained, this appears to be an all or nothing failure: the popup gets to all members, or none. It's therefore likely to be a server problem, not viewer.

Partial fix:

Sometimes the following black-magic formula seems to help some senders:
1. Clear cache and relog
2. Teleport
3. Remove all HUDs and unnecessary attachments, even clothing
4. Attempt resend

Clearly this isn't a reasonable solution for two reasons:

• Simply to send a notice, this is wildly excessive effort.
• For a handful of avatars this doesn't work. I have at least 3 designers who cannot send popups not matter what they do, and some have resorted to using alts, others given up. No predictable pattern as to why this so seriously affects some av's and not others has yet been found.

Possibly relevant details:

This problem isn't isolated to my own group, but because of my group's size and notice frequency, it's a stand-out. It seems to occur with larger groups, my own currently home to 570 users and growing. It appears that any group over a certain size may be subject to this bug, which clearly isn't a viable outcome for Second Life: group functionality must scale.

Also of note but possibly not relevant is the number of people sending notices: currently 160 are authorised to, and well over 100 are doing so regularly.

Dependence of the problem on the occupancy level/busyness of the group is undetermined - no clear relationship.

Conclusion:

Although this problem is clearly recognised by residents in other large groups, I would be very happy for my group to be used as a focus for this generalised problem, and happy to interact with support directly, as my group depends so strongly on notice functionality. I would hope that close examination of notice performance in my Fashion Consolidated group would help debugging the problem across the grid.

Some members have reported to me that on contacting Online Help they have simply been advised that this problem occurs with "too large a group" and given no impression that this is being resolved. As the SL population continues to grow, this clearly needs to be fixed at high priority, as group functionality is vital to community cohesion. I spoke with Robin Linden at her get-together and she indicated that she wasn't aware of this problem and would follow it up.

Thanks for your time,
Honey Fairweather