Category:LSL Group

In Second Life, a group is an association of 2 or more people. As of July 2008, there is still a fee of L$100 to create a new group. Once created, a group's name cannot be changed. Nor, it appears, can it be re-used.

To survive, a group must continue to have 2 or more people. If a group gets down to 1 person only, or fewer than that even, the system will purge it eventually.

The creator of a group can set joining conditions to:
a) invitation only;
b) open to join, but there is a fee to join;
c) open to join for free.

Group members are able to accord each other some access privileges, and can do sharing of financial items such as land tier, etc, if they choose. Some vending systems allow you to tell your vendors to accord certain discounts to group members. [1]

Land and objects can be set to a group, shared with a group or be deeded to a group.

There is a limit of 25 groups that a person may belong to, as of July 2008. The original limit was 10; this was raised to 15 in SL 1.4.0.

When a person has a group active, that group's name appears in the bubble above his or her head. This is referred to as the "group tag." "Having your group tag active" means having a certain group currently set to be your active group.

Upon joining a group, it immediately sets itself to become your active group at that time (some people find this annoying.)

There is as of yet (July 2008) no way of telling what groups someone belongs to, or of knowing what is the name of the group that they currently have active. The best you can do is compare the group they have active with the group that an object is set to, and get an answer as to whether they match or not. You do this using either llDetectedGroup() or llSameGroup().

Watch out for these gotchas:
1) a non-transferable item such as a radio cannot be deeded to a group, thus it can never work on land deeded to a group;
2) a group-deeded object cannot give out inventory;
3) You cannot use llGiveMoney to give money to a group.

[1] This though, owing to the limited group functionality in SL, only works if they have their group tag active at time of purchase.