#SL Large Groups Edit Rolled Out

Builder’s Brewery sent out an announcement about the Large Group Edit Change (SVC-4968 – readable by all) that rolled out this last Tuesday (week 46). The new code should be on all regions now. The Beta viewer has the code to take advantage of the change.

Whoever wrote the announcement wasn’t quite up on what the changes do and how they affect you but, for practical purposes they are close enough. If you have followed the coverage here, I think you’ve heard better details.

A quick recap of Large Groups, somewhere over 10,000 to 15,000 members, is they could not be loaded for editing. If you fiddled enough you might get a 20k or so group to load. The actual size of a list that could be loaded depended on how well SL was performing and your connection. This made it generally impossible to edit large lists. So, members that hadn’t logged into SL for a year or more could not be pruned out of the group. Roles in the group could not be changed. That has been fixed.

If you have an old viewer, you will now only be able to edit groups with 10,000 members or less. It won’t matter how much you fiddle, Larger Groups will not load to older viewers. The reason for that is the server sees how the data is being requested; via UDP (old style API) or HTTP protocol (new style API). If the new server code sees a request via the UDP API, it knows not to try and load a more than 10k member list into the viewer.

Eventually the UDP protocol will go away. The Lab is giving Third Party Developers time to make the change over to the new code. There is no ETA on how long the grace period is.

My current copy of the SL Viewer 3.4.0 (264911) does not have the updated viewer side code. The main SL Viewer 3.4.1 (266581) according to the release notes does not have the new code.  The Beta SL Viewer 3.4.2 (266708) and later does have the changes per the release notes.

I’ve been using the Beta version. It has been changing versions quickly as the Lab tries to resolve some problems. So, if you have had recent bad experiences with the Beta Viewer, it is probably time to try it again. Depending on the version the crash rate is up or down. It changes quickly. You take your chances, but it does offer the ability to work with Large Groups.

I see the inclusion of the new group code in the Firestorm viewer. I think that code is only out in their beta versions.

Nirans Viewer has a fix Niran describes as: “…group handling code for groups with 10k people, …” I assume this is the code that allows Large Group Lists to be retrieved by HTTP, but I’m not sure.

There is no official news on the Exodus Viewer. They are involved in creating the coming materials system. I didn’t think to ask Geenz if their beta has the group code.

Summary

Those of you that have large groups to work with let me know how it is working. I understand the user interface is not complete. I think it is missing a progress indicator. So, one just has to be patient and hope it is working.

 

2 thoughts on “#SL Large Groups Edit Rolled Out

  1. The memberlist seems to load fine with the beta viewer. Though for some reason the amount of members in my group increased by about 15%.

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