Are they shutting the forums down because of such negative feedback?

I mean after hearing and reading that they are going to shut down all of the conversation forums, like General chat and The sandbox, i just wondered if they are doing this because of the spam when the patches come out and how negative residents are about Linden Labs.

It will be nice to be able to still talk about scripting in the scripting tips but im sure anything brought up about patches will be automaticly deleted and stuff..

*sigh*

Yes! If they can't read abour negative feedback, then obviosly there isn't any negative feedback.

Oh sure, a few people might send in emails or something, or perhaps a handful of people might talk some smack on some barely used who-the-hell-cares-what-they-say 3rd party website, but those are individuals, certainly not a community response.

More proof that Linden Lab do not listen to the community.

The people who pay their salaries.

The people who keep them in a job.

Lewis

zOMG! Linden Lab has become Sony Online Entertainment!

*cries*

They're shutting it down because we can't stick to topic. All the useful information keeps getting buried.

I disagree. All joking aside, I don't think that is true. Nor do I think it is the million other theories offered up as conspiracies or criticism. I think it is just another step in Phllip's vision to de-centralize SL. I just think it's one we aren't ready for yet and feel it will have many unextpected negative consequences in world on community and business both.

Perhaps they closed down the forums because of all the hackeneyed, repetitive 30 posts made every update Wednesday complaining about how LL should work harder on (insert your bitch here).

Well, now that the forums are closed, that means more resources and staff that will go towards working on the actual SL program. Happy now? ... No? Hmm, color me surprised.

Sorry, but no, that doesn't make sense. Not unless you are implying that they plan to fire the employees that currently do sommunity management, web devlopment, and the like. These employees, like Torley for insatnce, do not code, fix bugs, or design new features for the program itself. Thus this move does not equal more respources doing those things. Not unless they fire the community staff and hire more coders.

And BTW, I am not a bitcher or complainer about updates, thank you. I have even been accused of being a LL apologist. But, I do think this is a poor move. Dumping everyone who disagrees with this forum closing into some single category of easily dismissed zOMG foos is no more helpful than the people you are criticizing yourself.

Perhaps I should have used clearer wording in my post- When I referred to the "program", I was referring to the emcompassment of the SL in-world project (I didn't want to use "game" since that would just cause "It's not a game!" replies, so I chose the word "program". I didn't mean for it to refer to just the feature/bug aspect.

I was alluding, instead, to points such as bandwidth resources that the forums were using can be used for in-world users rezzing textures, the hardware that was running the forums could be used to help improve something like the asset server cluster, and rather than having to enforce the forums, community management Lindens like Torley and Jeska can better spend their time enforcing all that unverified account griefing. All these are complaints which I have seen griped about in the forums in repetitive posts many times over.

QFMFT!

NGE 4Evah!

My question is what kind of resources do the forums consume that Lindens can no longer afford to dedicate these resources to the forums? I mean, it's not like they're reading the forums, they farmed that out to the resmods. The software behind the forums is open source and freely available.

Sooooo.... where's the resource hog?

If Anything, The forums have been helping us think that the whole SL is not down. We fool ourselves during downtimes by signing on here and continuing with posts and discussions waiting for the grid to come back up. Now we have to go to a third party forum website. Great. hehe.

Troy

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA.

<3

FYI, Torley does an extensive amount of testing, as well as aggregating feedback on features and communicating with the developers. I would much rather Torley spend time on those tasks, personally.

Because you know that ex forum and community moderators make GREAT programmers.

Right.

vBulletin is not open source, or free. As far as resource, their fixation on moderation and disciplinary action is where their resources were going to. It's definitely not a hardware/software issue. Forums are not an income generator, so it was hard for them to justify throwing more money at people to support it (hence we got resmods so LL could once again use volunteers instead of hiring real employees). The reasons given for closing the forums are pretty lame in my estimation - but then they have never made any secret of hating the forums.

There are a whole lot of dead horses who beg to differ.

http://www.vbulletin.com/order/

Practically free... lol though your point is well taken.

"Negative feedback"...I think you misspelled that. The *correct* version is, "Honest feedback".

There are aparently a lot of people out there who seem to misinterperate being honest and telling the truth as they see it as being negative. I'm sure that all of those people are aplauding right now, knowing that the new blog reply aproach will limit everything to sweetness and light, with no need to hear about problems.

At least, not until they become so serious that they *can't* avoid them, and probably where nothing can be doen about them.

As I've said elsewhere, when you burry your head in the sand, your ass becomes a target.

I agree.

I know LL really plans to decentralize (kinda obvious) but during this transition period where there's so much functionality and privacy/security features that still need to be discussed? Too early.

It's like they opened up the registration before anti-grief tools were made. This decentralization is happening at a bad time. Perhaps when the anti-grief tools are complete as are the privacy tools, sure. When the current crop of feature/interface bugs are fixed, sure.

If they can pull that off in the month before they close the forums, fine. But I would rather they have set it for one month after the major lag issues and the other concerns I mentioned have been fixed.

If they want to close the forums, that's their business, though I do think it's a rash decision. There will be more forums, just google it in a few weeks and I bet you there will be enough of them to keep us serial posters happy.
Until then, you can find me at my blog:
http://slshopaholic.blogspot.com

My theory on why they are closing the forums is this: because the forums are driving away potential new users. The forums (specifically the "axis of evil" forums, i.e., general, sandbox, and L&E) have always been an f-ed up mess. When I first signed on, I distinctly remember thinking to myself, "It's no wonder the forums are closed to the public. Alot of people would never sign-up if they could read this crap first."

Before 6/6/06, you had to provide payment info to access the forums. Now you can get here for free. You still have to sign-up, but it's much easier. I wonder how many people sign-up, come to the forums, lurk for a few days, and leave thinking SL is full of jerks.

The forums aren't all bad though. Through all the crap there are good posts and good posters. It just takes a while to understand that some people are just trolls and like to stir up trouble and the people who post here (good and bad) are the vocal minority.

I don't really buy the idea that LL doesn't want negative feedback. Like any other company, they probably value the *constructive* feedback. One of the problems here is that there those who post too emotionally and are, frankly, assholes about how they criticize LL. It may be understandable to be pissed, but nobody wants to be spoken to in a mean way.

I don’t really like that they’re close down, but I’ll wait and see how it is afterward. I missed the writing on the wall, because I thought they were here to stay. At the same time, it doesn’t seem all that surprising either.

That is an interesting observation since the forums are one of the things that kept me in SL. I learned about how SL works, where to find cool builds and sims and stores and how to create things on the forums more than in SL itself. And made friends here I would have never met inworld.

No, the official excuse is that this is a drain on LL resources, although every "nonessential" part of doing business is. SL can function without the forums, but it will suffer for it, imho.

Sounds like they listen to some folks, Lewis.

Maybe you've earned a spot on their /ignore lists...

Not the whole reason IMO but good points. Hear hear. I hate losing the forums, but yes there are way too many trolls and intolerant people.

@Jopsy

I know they're hearing me out at least and I'm no real oldie. I guess being able to keep one's cool even in very hot situations helps.