Closing of the forums, de-centralization of SL, and the future...

Aye. I worry about the closing on the forums as well. I have been considering reopening SLDrama.com again, but have to moderate it against the truth that if I start a forum...

A. I have to deal with all the same problems LL is getting rid of.
B. I have to maintain the site and make sure it continues to function against all attacks.
C. Pay for it. With really no hope of getting my money back on it.

Now, what's in it for someone to start up a forum? Prestiege? Money? Entertainment?

No real money in it. Might be entertaining. Nobody cares who runs a forum, so prestiege is out. (In fact, the owners of forums get more hate than love on most days, from what I've seen across the net.)

I also have other fears: LL can't censor other websites. What are they going to do if something really nasty appears there? They have given up the rights to actually control what IS being said.

Then again, the control only existed as far as the edge of these forums anyway. And they have already said that SL is going to de-centralize as time goes on, allowing others to licence the 3d portion of the software and use it as needed.

I guess that they are making a point: SL will eventually given to the masses, and when that happens, SL as a single world will probably be shut down. I just wonder if LL will allow people to download their items and sim data so they can populate their own sims with it...

You'll prolly see a proliferation of special-interest websites for the various subcultures / interest-groups in SL. Not a bad thing really. Realistically Linden Labs only need to host the technical forums. The fact that they've decided to keep on the content forums is an added bonus.

Setting up & hosting a forum does require a certain level of commitment. LL has changed the ground rules as regards the forums. It will be interesting to see who has the commitment to set up their own special-interest forums.

One thing that *would* be very useful would be a page with links to 3rd-party interest group forums and websites. Such a page would be very easy for LL to implement and it would be a reassuring way for them to underwrite their commitment to diversity and the growth of the SL community as well as keeping the SL website as the first point-of-contact.

With the amount of posting done here, Foolish, a few well placed ads could certainly cover the costs(RL-ads....although SL-ads would be cool too)

Mr. Frost, I think this may be closer to the mark than many other speculations on the signifcance of this event. Everything--particularly online things--have a life-span, especially when one recognizes that--as I have been saying for longer than I care to remember--"SL is not just a product in transtion, it is a transitional product."

With that said, I have never been quite sure what LL's business plan was, or what particular magnificent obsession they are doggedly pursuing (yes, for those who missed the literary reference in my thread about the SL experience feeling like being in certain books or movies, I do see some parallels between Mr. Rosedale and a certain whaleship captain that Gregory Peck so admirably portrayed). Like most here, I have my suspicions, and those generally tend to run in the direction that LL never intended to create a smoothly functioning product called Second Life, that once perfected, would run indefinitely while supporting a dynamic and dedicated user community.

I always felt we were part of a big experiment that will eventually feed into the creation of some very different product or products, and that LL has been using this phase of the project essentially to see what people would do with the basic concept and to identify and train a contributor base of individuals and companties that would be ready to provide services, content, and experiences to a massively expanded user base.

In that kind of context, the continued application of resouces to the forums did not make sense.

I started sl-forums.com, thought maybe someone would be interesting in helping building it up but have had no responses.

In what way? Building up, that is?

I described the opening of the registrations as something that was essentially inevitable, given the direction SL has always been shooting for.

This is another one.

I don't think it is necessary to decentralize out-of-world communications in order to decentralize SL itself, but it isn't surprising that the idea would occur to them or that it'd eventually happen.

What is surprising is that they'd do it now, when there are no clear alternatives in or out of world.

There are some potential options (SLuniverse, second citizen, etc), but the fact that people are still proposing to create entirely new forums as a replacement tells me that none of the existing ones have sufficient mindshare to maintain coherency, which in turn tells me this may have been a rather premature move (even more than the registration changes). Perhaps they got impatient waiting for alternatives to develop, and decided to force the issue.

And moderated weblog comments as a serious (and, more importantly, scalable) communications medium? Don't make me laugh. It's a one-way, opaque, klunky, and low-interactivity channel that at any non-trivial level of usage will probably occupy far more moderation resources than the forums ever did.

Brilliant and constructive point of view. I feel much better about the issue already.

We have a little over 3 weeks to build the new external multi-forum platform. I believe we can pull it off.

Well like you said, you would have to monitor it, I'd like to get a group of moderators that control it instead of having it beeing a 1-man job, as well as input on forum topics and policies.

I saw you started it so I'll link to your site Was just going to ask what made you shut it down.

Well. The honest truth is the server was a dedicated at the time, and cost me a good chunk of change. I had no SL based customers interested in teh side product that was supposed to sell on the server, and SLdrama died as a part of it.

Such is Life. Anyway. Aye. I'm rebuilding it now. Will let everyone know when it's ready for playtime.

It's ready...

Look it over, kick the tires, and let me know how much I need to abuse it before it's useful.

www.SLDrama.com