Persistent Group Chat
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Extrude Ragu
Hi! I run a medium sized Community in Second Life.
Over the years, my community, like many others moved from using the Group Chat features in Second Life to discord due to the need for the ability to have persistent discussions that happen over the long term.
However, I feel that this has had the side effect of giving my community less of a reason to log into Second Life. After all, all of the community discussions happen outside of Second Life now in discord instead.
I believe that if we had a persistent group chat, many users will log into Second Life, simply to see what messages they missed in the group chats whilst they were away, which will ultimately lead to more activity.
Communities like mine would be able to transition back to using Second Life as our primary communication venue, which will be good for Second Life's long-term health as more people will be engaging with the platform and helping it to grow, and in turn help financially justify other much-needed improvements to the group chat system.
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Nya Jules
I read from your suggestion that you mean by "persistent group chat" that group chat messages are stored indefinitely or at least long term for everyone to see but keeping everything else as is, so you'll be able to scroll group chat and see what others have written.
"many users will log into Second Life, simply to see what messages they missed"
I'm not convinced of that. I think this starts failing as soon as there's a message drought. People do that 2 times, log in every day to check group chat, then don't find new or relevant messages, and they start checking less and less. If there's really something important chance is high they miss it and people revert back to discord because it's just easier to keep track of and has a higher chance that it reaches more people in time.
Apart from that I have so many groups and I just cannot open every group chat and check the history. Now we can say this is only about important groups, true, but that is also very subjective. Maybe not everyone in your group finds the same group as important, which then is another factor that makes it less reliable.
I believe the natural alternative to Discord isn't persistent group chat but inworld meetings. At least this is what I remember from Discord-less days, that's what we've done, and that's what we're doing way less nowadays, also because of Discord.
Also just mentioning this for sake of completeness: Discord can also make people log into SL, for example by event reminders.
I'm not writing this to defend discord, I'm not a Discord fan, I'm just stating things as they are in my eyes, and which is also why I had been pondering about what an SL launcher (yes which can also be controversial) could improve in helping to get rid of Discord https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/desktop-always-on-sl-launcher-like-bnet-client
Irishk9 Aeon
This issue spans a number of SL areas. The use of blender & other apps in building for example also takes you away from logging into SL.
Judy Wunderland
agreed!
SL Feedback
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SL Feedback
Hello, and thank you for your feature request regarding persistent group chat. This is indeed a valuable suggestion that could enhance community engagement within Second Life. We wanted to let you know that this feature has been brought up before in our previous bug tracking system (BUG-230899). We are merging your comments with the existing request to help prioritize it. While we cannot provide an estimate on when this might be implemented, please keep an eye on future updates. Your input is greatly appreciated, and we encourage you to continue sharing your ideas to help improve Second Life. Thank you!