I changed my mind, closing down the forums is a good thing.

@Nicholas


LL can always use the model Maxis used for The Sims. Maxis had official pages dedicated to listing fansites. These fan sites got tremendous amounts of traffic (yes they overloaded their respective servers) because all people had to do to find them was go to The Sims website and jump from there.


As for the two-way part, I'd like to see what they have in mind. But they've already mentioned that they're getting a lot of comments from outside the forums, that means the forum is not the only two-way conduit anymore.

It's hard to say when is the "right" time, but SL is growing beyond the capacity to support a single community hub. There's not a "SL community," there are dozens or hundreds of them, and the ones here on the forums are not being destroyed, simply moved along.

If you look at other MMOThingies, the official forums are mostly technical and strategic info, and don't receive enough attention to encourage trolls and chatter. Community is the exception in those games, and when it does develop, it generally moves to third-party sites. In SL, however, communication is a central activity--arguably the main activity--and it's bound to spill over into the forums and flood them with noise. Babel is inevitable. What we need now are more sophisticated ways of communicating with each other and LL. Some of this will be new forums and blogs, but we also need to grow our SL media and have at least a few vetted, non-LL news sources (and perhaps the M2 or others meet those criteria; I haven't read them enough to know).

What EA ended up doing was switching their TSO forums over to Stratics, with their representatives there, and the Stratics people running the forums part. That wouldn't be a bad idea here.


OK, let's consider the other two-way conduits:

1. Town Halls. (Got to have that voice thingie, I believe; got to be available at that hour, get there an hour early, hope they don't change the locale at the last minute, hope you can sit there in a packed sim without losing your connection, and hope your question gets addressed, and be ready to have your question edited to make it shorter before it gets posed. No actual back-and-forth conversation happens.

2. Resident Roundtable meetings. (You have to be able to attend, to sit in a crowded sim without crashing, and you may be banned from it a Linden wants to ban you. More informal than the above format, but those who have the strongest personalities and the best typing skills are at an advantage.)

3. IM'ing Lindens. This, along with horsing around with Lindens in general, is something you gotta either have a fair amount of nerve to do (I don't), or know you are already in with the Lindens enough to do.

4. Second Life Views. You have to be invited. (I haven't found out what happened with the application idea Robin had posted the possibility of.) You also have to be able to afford to take yourself to California.

5. The SLCC. Again, takes money.

Have I left anything out? If not, that leaves posting on their blogs, which means replying as a guest on their own personal site, to issues which they have chosen to bring up.

Conclusion: The forum might not be the ONLY two-way conduit, but it is the most democratic one, where every citizen can easily speak his piece on official Linden forums.

Networking - that's Linden-speak for, "You, too, can be F.I.C. if you try hard enough, make all the right friends, and don't get on our nerves!"

coco

Something else to remember too about that 10% figure. While only a small fraction of SL users read or post on the forums, that 10% (or whatever the actual percent is) probably consist of a higher amount of people who are committed to second life in general as opposed to the more passive general user.

And to avoid confusion, I'm not saying that those who don't post or read the forums are not contributors, only that the forum-folk just has a higher concentration of them.

Not that it matters now.

Most people who are in the forums are the ones who care most about their community.

Third party forums can work. I haven't played what is considered other traditional on line games, but a long time ago in a galaxy fragment far far away there was a wonderful little game called Stars!.

It was a very niche game, but for something that fit on one floppy disk, it spawned literally hundreds upon hundreds of fan based websites, one of which ultimately turned into the official unoffical forum.

But what found most interesting about my time playing Stars! was how the support was very similar to table top games, a good game will generate a tremendous amount of fan based support, be it strategy, how-to guides, varients, and so on. A lot of these games still have a huge following too, you'd be surprised at what a dedicated group of fans can do.

I see the same kind of fan based loyalty in Second Life too, and I hope LL realizes that support is just as valuable as revenue, servers or any other tangible asset they may have or wish to acquire.

I don't doubt that a good forum will eventually come to be. But it doesnt change that these forums are a true resource that is not fully appreciated by those who call themselves Lindens.

P.S.
If there are any other former Stars! players out there, feel free to say hi.

Good, bad? As if they care what anyone thinks. They're closing the forum down anyway.

Well, Ewan, I think they are listening, and will tweak this decision so as to let us keep more of the good stuff.

That's just what I think anyway, I could be all wrong.

coco