Second Life viewer version 1.19.0 isn't all that far away, though there's still some things blocking the progress so the exact timing is in doubt however Joshua Bell from Linden Lab provided some insights on the upcoming changes on the public Second Life Developer's Mailing list.
The most standout item on that summary was a change to the way group IM sessions work. Right now, you're automatically connected to a new group IM session for one of your groups, and a tab pops open for it as soon as the first message for that session is sent. Disconnecting from that session has been a little problematic lately, with session tabs popping back open again. All that was pitched to change.
Starting from viewer 1.19.0 (as was planned, anyway) you would not receive IM messages from any group, unless you already had that group tab open. If the tab was open in your IM window, you'd get IMs as and when they came through - if it was closed, nothing. Group notices and voting proposals would come through normally, but to monitor a group's IMs you would need to open the tab for the group manually, and then leave the tab for that group open. If you logged out, you would need to open the tabs manually again when you logged in.
There were two planned phases for this change according to Linden Lab's Jonathan Wolk. The first phase would be the basic change, as described above. The second change, which was slated to take place at some unspecified later date would allow users to specify a list of groups whose tabs should opened automatically on login.
Why the change? Apparently all this was to essentially ease the load on group IM subscription/session management systems.
The public developers' response to the plan was ... let's call it 'spirited'. Some might call it critical but it all seemed to be without any apparent rancor. Within two days, Joshua Bell said, "Based on the feedback so far from SLDEV we're reconsidering our plans."
Other options are now "being investigated" - and further information is promised when there's something to say.
Depending on the results, this feature might just go ahead as originally planned, may be implemented with minor modifications, or undergo a drastic overhaul. It's now 23 months since Linden Lab announced that plans were afoot to migrate the underlying IM system to Jabber (XMPP) after all.
Whatever it is that we end up getting, it probably won't be half as interesting as the process.
