There should be an outcry about the removal of the forums

Removing the forums? Are they out of their freaking minds?

"My friends, what would you have us do about His Majesty's government? Nothing we can tell them will have any real influence, for their minds and souls are made up, and their decisions are cast in iron. We have no voice, not a whisper, and they do not hear us, whether we choose to admit that fact, or not. We have not the power to affect them, and so we are swept along by the events, like fish in the noontide."

- Archibald Bulloch, representative from Georgia to the Second Continental Congress, in debate in July, 1776.

Amazing, isn't it? Of course, two days after Bulloch uttered these words, the SCC voted to support a declaration of independence. It didn't do any good. Nothing changed, and we remain the oppressed victims of a rapacious British colonial government even today, over two hundred years later.

Sadly some one was and the damage is rippling out into the internet. Postings about censorship and other current SL issues are popping up all over. The honeymoon is over and the jist is: LL vs Users (Residents).

The powers at be have not factored in that the users have the drive and determination to let their feelings be heard and felt. Google provides them the way of finding those that might listen. Those postings are readable by all. Not limited to those in game.

Rather than bitching around the kitchen table and keeping it in house. The dirty laundry will be out there for all to see, Blogged, Voted and syndicated.

There are those it seems who want the Forums closed. Why are they even bothering reading or posting?

The one I feel for the most is lass Torley the answers forum is going to explode, after her I feel for the help people.

This is an ill advised plan in my humble opinion.

Ill-advised? It's nuts. What will happen to people who need advice on technical matters? Where will they turn? I was going to ask how to put my avatar "to sleep" for instance, as I will be off the internet starting October. How fun would it be to come here one day and find the forums removed?

Every single MMO out there, be they small hobby projects with 300 subscribers, have a forum. Except SL with its 500,000 resident base and counting. Oh, I guess Second Life doesn't need forums because "it's not a game"... or something... errh... you see... nevermind.

Actually, the more that time goes on, the more Second Life becomes a game, only it's Linden Lab playing the game, with us as the pawns being moved around. It seems almost that it's a case sometimes to see how much we'll tolerate. All part of some giant psychological experiment that we're paying to be part of. Isn't it supposed to work the other way round?

Lewis

I was wondering that myself.
Then I remember someone saying they were hoping the residents would find ways to do this themselves.
But we are given a broken hammer to build an empire.
Yeah thats uh, yeah.

:edit:
I can't find where they are saying the forums will be removed though.
I read the blog but I didn't see anything.

Then why are you posting on them?

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/08/10/forums-take-a-new-turn/#more-380




This shows up by putting "closed" in as a search term on the main blog page.

Haven't youy figured it out yet? LL and a close group of players associated with them (known as the FIC) doesn't want the forums anymore, and won't listen to any of us whine about keeping the forums. They don't want the forums because they allow people to have a centralized voice, where LL sometimes does often listen. It's better for those in control to mute any centralized voice, and relegate community discussions to 3rd party websites, where any voice will be diluted and mistrusted due to the inability to verify who is saying what.

But, honestly we as a community have grown out of our infancy. For SL to become that 15 million user-base or whatever, we have to be come more of a consumer market than a community or world. SL needs to be a homogenous, docile, and clean environment for large RL corporations, for the regular "game player" to want to be in SL. The work necessary to maintain a real world, with all of the drahma and dirtyness which is human life (first or second) doesn't fit in with the model of a RL business required to earn RL profits.

I would think that those of us that believed in a new-world, a virtual world where we were a diverse and dynamic community of individuals (not special groups of users, corporations, etc) would need to find a new world where everything is controlled by us as a group. Each person would have individual rights, just like in RL. In SL, your rights can be suspended for any reason at any time by those in power. I will start looking at additional worlds that are popping up to see if they have come to the level of SL where we can script objects, work in Real Time, and build our own world. (No, I'm not leaving SL. I love SL)

Until then, we have the world as it is. There will be those in power who can squash your ability to communicate, who can try to silence you to better themselves. SL is still a good world, just not improving to some of us rather moving in the wrong direction.

You hit it head on. Unfortunately a lot of the people around today are too "young" in SL to really know of the FIC. But another thread pointed it out pretty well; LL has to strive to keep us loyal to their outdated and technologically inferior software, otherwise as soon as something better comes up we're all jumping ship for the pretty pictures. I, for one, have no loyalty here, and the only thing that kept me from deleting my account outright is because I no longer pay for it anymore. As soon as something better -- better run, better programming, better customer service, better experience -- finally shows up, I'm gone and I hope to take all my friends with me.

windozer, unless you're an ALT, you haven't been around at the height of Anshe's damage to Second Life. Sure she's fine now, but that's because she was so bad that even LL made a point of telling her to correct herself. When you gross 150,000.00 USD a year (and imagine how much of that goes to LL for land tier fees?) if you're doing enough wrong that management finally tells you to fix yourself, you must be bad.

But this isn't an "Anshe Sux0r" thread. Search the forum and you can find out why she's resoundingly disliked by most of the old(er)-timers. I have no envy for what she does; she's not Starax, there's no talent to be made to buying land cheaply and selling the same parcel out to someone else for rip-off prices. If she made 150,000.00 USD a year creating her own content then I would be jealous, yet respectful. As it is she's just a low individual with a bad Chinese Businesswoman accent.

Positively absolutely. This is precisely the way I feel. Just someplace where the world wasn't so 'grey' all the time, where more than 10 people could congregate at the same place without creating massive lags, and trousers took less than 20 minutes to change and resolve, would constitute a notable improvement.

Paying for being experimented upon is probably part of the experimenting.

Here's a novel idea that occurred to me;

How about anytime anything happens that otherwise would've gone to the forums that LL doesn't pay attention to, instead we bring it up in Livehelp?

I wonder how fast the forums will be brought back....

Pissing off the volunteers in Live Help won't send a message to LL. It'll just piss off the volunteers in Live Help.

Torley Linden once told me that the reason the forums are here are so we can get together as a community and discuss issues. Also, they aren't as harsh on people because in theory we can discuss things here.

SO by taking the forums away they take away the community's ability to communicate with itself. In essence they're taking away any sort of real global contact. I say yes, we bug LiveHelp constantly and see how long this, another stupid freaking choice by LL, who are TOTALLY out of touch, will last.

Given LL's track record, it'll last forever. Linden Labs, I know you rarely read this. However. I'm begging you to fix this poor choice. Already I'm hearing person after person say they'll ditch SL the second a better game comes along, because you guys screw us left and right.

Pleasepleaseplease stop these shockingly poor decisions!

All I can say about Torley is that I'm immensely disappointed with him. I've known (of) him for quite some time and I was honestly shocked to come back after my self-imposed hiatus and see how he'd sold out the community he so loved, whether he intended to fix the system on the "inside" or not. It's obvious that he's ended up about the same as the rest of them and that saddens me. :/

So I ask you Joshua. What originaly, creative build have you added to help fix this problem?

Content is the one thing we can't blame on LL. People will build what interest them. Having a forum will not fix that problem.

I've been a part of many group projects as well as my own things; not to toot my own horn but I made many cell-shaded avatars that I still see being used today, or inspirations thereof. All the spherical-orb type avatars came from my original design. You can also find my tutorial for cell shading still in the forum. But I don't need to get into a pissing contest about any of that. I wasn't blaming the forum on content and vice versa, I was pointing out the general downward trend that LL isn't interested in changing. The forum is only another piece to that.

FIC? Come on Hank, I always thought you had more brains than to buy into these stupid theories.

Maybe, just a hunch, but LL is sick of giving people an outlet to slander them like your very post does on a resource they flip the bill for. The forums are no longer a productive creative outlet to share ideas. I cant remember the last time I saw a productive thread on these forums.

It's very much not a theory in the least. It's pretty obvious.

No more than usual

Really? Well, would you mind awfully paying your taxes now?

Pretty obvious?

Please point me to any evidence where LL seeked guidence from the mighty FIC on the decision to close the forums.

This should be so easy since it's pretty obvious.

Reread what Hank actually wrote before you make strawman arguments, s'il tu plais?