The Myth of (Un)Scalability

LL has justified the closure of the forums by stating that they are unscalable, while at the same time maintaining that SL itself is scalable. Given that there's an asset server with flames coming out of it, while the forum server cools its heels, is there any truth to be had from LL or is it all just excuses and marketing?

You're sore upset at losing your stage, huh?

They need the machine that's running the forums to use as the new asset server, that's the real reason the forums are closing.

Daft as that sounds, it gets more plausible by the day.

It surely can't help that they automatically sign up every registered user to the forums immediately their account is created, whether they ever use the forums or not.

But yeah. It's complete bullshit. It comes down to the fact that Torley and Robin just want them gone, and fuck what we want.

I must admit, I'm sorely disappointed in Torley, considering that she's used these forums as her platform for the entire time she's been here it seems a bit of a hypocritical backstab to now wish them gone for the entire community. I am 99% certain that she would not be a Linden now if it weren't for her participation in these forums.

Also makes me wonder what the fuck she's going to actually DO now, apart from corporate sponsored rainbow sunshine neon watermelon related inworld hijinks. Nice work if you can get it, I guess.

And as for Robin, I don't think she's really been in touch with the community for a few years now.

Still... on the upside, all the criticisms and truths we level at LL and SL are now going to be out there for anyone to view rather than here behind closed doors. That can only be a good thing, because in my experience new visitors who have been tempted by the hype and bullshit of SLs promise become quickly disappointed and disillusioned by the truth of the experience.

Err, SL != forum. Different systems scale differently. Some scale very well, some don't at all. For instance, if you ignore the asset server SL should be infinitely scalable - if you want more power, just add more servers. On the other hand, the forums have a very finite scalability. There is a point where the database can't keep up on just one server, and replication has limits. Then there's that mySQL has crap scalability as well.

It does take someone of below average mentality to not understand when they say scaleability, it has nothing to do with hardware.

Surely then the simple solution was just to acquire and train more moderators, OR export the whole shebang to a third party forum site which is large and experienced enough to be able to cope?

Simply telling us that we aren't worth listening to is probably one of the worst PR moves I have ever seen.

Lewis

i know nothing about mySQL or scalability stuff and it makes my head hurt, so i'll put my question in simple language: i would like to know why somebody like blizzard doesn't seem to have a problem keeping the multitudinous WoW forums open with a subscriber base an order of magnitude larger than ours. granted not all 6+ million will be on the forums at the same time, but presumably a comparible percentage?

does this mean forum software and hardware has a top limit of participants, and we've reached it already? or is this a question of money and staff, and LL hasn't got enough of either at the moment to support forums?

They tried this, remember? However, none of them seem to be worthy enough for some of the residents, to the point where they became pincushions for those who had nothing better to do than demonize them.

The ones who had the loudest voices were the ones who led to the impending demise of these forums. They only have themselves to blame.

Bear in mind, not all the sections are to be closed. There are also multitudes of other reasonable ways to voice your opinions in a civil manner. They just aren't as dramatic or crowd pleasing.

That's because the whole system was badly implemented from the start. For example, a forum moderator should have a separate identity from their in-world character, which gives moderators the freedom to do the work they have to, without fear of in-world griefing because they are simply doing their job.

There were many volunteers - but Linden Lab ignored that. In the end, the resmods became the target for Linden Lab's inefficiencies in this department, and are in a way being blamed for a decision which is much larger than themselves.

As already stated, there are much much larger and active communities out there who seem to manage with tens of thousands of concurrent active users - yet a company which claims to be at the "cutting edge of technology" and representing "the future of the internet" is incapable of running a simple forum?

Lewis

They are unscalable from a support perspective. The drama queens are costing them too much money

I could fix that in a week.

New rule: The forums are not any one users playtoy.

Ban anyone who breaks it. Permaban.

Of course, it would be a subjective rule, granted. But it would let a single iron-fisted moderator keep the forums in check.

There are scalable forums and I am starting to get the feeling that this might be a sign of impending takeover, an acquirement by a major player in the online gaming business world, possibly Sony. I am not trying to compare SL with gaming but that is not how the business world sees things. I just hope that SL continues for a long time successfully without interference from third parties trying to make a cash cow for themselves.

Anybody would be a pincushion regardless of whether theres a veil of anonymity. There is nothing inherently complex about running a forum. Like the russians would say, they can train a monkey to do it. Its just very tedious. So much so, a monkey would run away from it too, given time.

What would've probably worked well here would be to make every single resident a moderator, so we can ban each other repeatedly. Eventually, you'd come to a point where being nasty is lonely, and you'd stop banning each other and make amends.

I dunno - I tend to agree that the forums are unscalable. I don't mean unscaleable as a discussion venue; someone already pointed out that the blizzard forums handle many more registered users than Linden does here.

I think that the way that Linden has structured their community feedback channels, and the way that they've used the forums in the past to listen to what the community is saying.... that is the part that is not scaleable.

There was a time long ago, when listening to the forum community meant that you were getting a decent cross section of the SL population. That time has long since passed. Most people that come my way day to day are barely cogniscant that the forums even exist. The forums have almost become a seperate community from in-world - linked, yet autonomous in its own right.

Perhaps instead of trying to cut off communication, maybe Linden is instead attempting to explore other avenues that will touch more of the in-world community. Or not, and I just need to lay off the Kool-aid

Banning everyone who farts the wrong way would just end up costing even more money in support and additionally, lost business.
Not to mention you would alienate everyone you DIDNT ban, and hurt LL's reputation

Scalability is the ability of a system to grow in performance as additional resources are added.

Some things are "embarrassingly parallelizable" -- just throw more hardware at it, and it goes faster. For example, password cracking. Just divide the problem evenly between computers. 10 times more computers, 10 times faster.

On the other extreme, you have things like "9 women can't make a baby in a month", which are not parallelizable at all, so if you already have the best hardware for the task you can't do any better.

Most things are somewhere between those. SL, with the exception of the dataserver seems to be mostly in the first category: just keep adding sims to spread the load, and there doesn't seem to be any limit to the total number of sims that can exist.

Most systems aren't that nice though, for example many databases have very crappy performance when there are both many readers and many writers. If you design the database and application badly, it'll easily die under heavy load. That's not to say it can't be done, but not all things are well done.

Databases also most of the time don't scale infinitely. The easiest way to scale a database is to add slaves -- you have a master box which takes all the updates, and distributes to the slaves. Then you can read the data from any slave. This works so long your write load doesn't overwhelm a single server, after that you're stuck.

Now, the forums aren't an especially hard problem, but depending on the implementation getting better performance might mean switching to a different database or forum software for example.

This is exactly the point I'm trying to make. For every forum-based problem there is an equivalent in-world problem. How is one scaleable and the other is not?

Normally, you announce a replacement before its closure. I don't think that there's any doubt that the majority of the community do not feel the 'blog' as an acceptable replacement.

Lewis

I don't think I've seen LL ever say the blog is a replacement for the forums. It's a replacement for the announcements board maybe. The general/etc forums are simply going away with no replacement.

I don't really understand what you're complaining about though. You plug that stratics thing in your sig in every post, I would think you'd like having more people in your preferred forum.

My concern is that there are no "official" forums being provided, just a mishmash of resident run sites, of varying standards, that will no longer provide a unified voice for Linden Lab to respond to.

Of course, it would be preferable to have been given an 'official replacement', and out of all the options, I strongly believe that Stratics would have been one of the few in a position to take on that responsibility, and to have done it very effectively. By the way, that's speaking as an SL user, not officially on behalf of Stratics.

Over the next month or so, there will be a lot of confusion as people chase each other from forum to forum, trying to keep up with what's going on and find their friends. It will settle down, however, as the leaders stride ahead at the front, and others fall by the wayside. Then, hopefully, people will see for themselves which forums are worth contributing to, and which ones are best avoided.

Lewis