Losing ownership of forums may be a pain

Lindens mean that resident forums will do it, in addition to the official blog and other tools like that. That is probably true, even if we will have a big dispersion of posters and redundancy of informations in all that private forums. That alone is a problem but someone may think its not a big one.

Bigger problem is the ownership of the above forums by residents. Imagine the community starts gathering around a very well made forum made by one of the residents, and that forum becomes very important for Second Life. Imagine now this resident going to leave SL and not being mature enough to organize a handing over to someone of the forums database. We will have one of the foremost community tools going down the drain in seconds.

Click. Click. Wtf.. "Im sorry for this but im not going to use SL anymore cause of this and that sux and the forums are from now on offline. Kthxby".

And then?

I seen that happen already in another community, that was a good mmorpg that didnt have a own forum. 99% of the community underpinned to this private website, but the owner got mad about the game developers and closed the whole thing.

We do the same thing the internet does and what LL is hoping we will do. Redundant services. If one part of the internet goes down, the rest still functions. As long as there's a need, the loss of a website will lead to other websites appearing in its stand.

Of course we shouldn't have one forum. We need several.

Having several private forums makes things harded to find/discuss. If 10% of residents use forums on a regular basis, and we have something like 3-4 main forums, either all have to use all that forums making it harder to do anything, or we will have on each of this forums something like 2-3% of the residents. The majority of people will anyway go to the forum that looks like the "bigger" one.

This is the very reason i was in fear that if SL became open source we wouldnt be able to trust our grids to stay up. But as of now i wish it would be open source so we could customize it how WE want it to be not how THEY want it to be.

Some game publisher use a third party company to manage community. That may actually be a solution if LL doesnt like to manage the official forums.

LL wants SL to become the 3D internet. At least, that's Philip's dream.

I would love the forums to stay but something that big cannot have a centralized forum, that's for sure. It's going to be hard to discuss stuff, that's true, but it will only be at the beginning and because we've been used to this centralized forum.

Give it some time and you'll see specialized forums opening up along with competing forums and redundant forums. There are many discussions that are run successfully over the internet despite having many scattered forums. Sooner or later people linkup discussions as you notice has been happening here too. Look at how often someone links to a different forum.

That's really how the 'net was made to work. It's a web of information, not a library.

it's hard to discuss things in SL like a forum does since nothing is static. it's all open chat. Nothing gets saved for later reading. Also you have to be in a active group to get conversation or be in a crowd. I like ot hangout in my low lag sim and post on the forums. If only the forums would somehow be moved inside SL then phillips dream would be complete.

Have the forums built into the interface like the help system (i can already do that with a simple settings change). IRC chat channels would be nice too. Group sessions are just anoying IMO.

And worse, who knows how long the next major exploit will exist (and where it will spread) before the Lindens catch wind of it.

That alone should be reason enough to keep SOME kind of direct communication here.

Unless, of course, LL WANTS people to manufacture billions of L$...*

*not saying an exploit for this EXISTS, but it could well...