Suggestion: Close These Forums

Yes, I am serious. Take a moment to tally up the amount of:

- Personnel Hours
- Network and Operation Costs
- Agida (You may know it as 'agita' or 'adgita' or perhaps even 'adgida')

You could maintain announcements, hotline, feedback, and reference/policies for direct communication vehicles and very likely never miss a beat. Certainly you would free up folks for pursuits more productive to furthering your product/service in the marketplace.

Bah.

The forums are the best melting pot for the ragtag community that SL has. If you close it, the community withers and dies.

LF

Hardly. If these forums close, then those who really wish to foster community will make their own, and very likely with more attention to them and management of them than LL can afford while trying to expand their offering.

There is something to be said for asynchronous communication. And I think you've seen enough of the dreck here that shows they probably don't police too hard. 'Twould be much cheaper to use a slashdot-style reader moderation system which allows the trolls to get their jollies while actual discourse can happen and *I* don't have to see the trolls. Though there is a fair amount of bitching about moderation on /. too, but again I don't see it unless I forget to login as me.

We may not have a large enough population for that to work though. Sigh.

I thought the forums was the metaverse and SL was a screensaver.

SL? What's SL?

Ah, yes, brilliant! If LL removes itself in another way from its community, it shall be more like Sony Online Entertainment, and it shall rule the MMOs!!!! Next, let's remove liasons - surely they're a waste of time too?

</sarcasm>

Why not off source the help lines too so when you call, I am helping you please now yes ? Your ticket number is becoming 000452897654289001 most gracious thank you.

Various forms of sarcasm and general snideness aside (which, while they demonstrate nicely all the arguments FOR closing the forums, fail to justify anything other), it remains that support doesn't happen here, but through the tech email or call in numbers (as stated in policy, despite the popular-if-erroneous belief that all support happens on the forums).

The ego posters can find other venues and in all honesty, they are the only ones that will care enough to do so.

I'd have to find something else to do to pass the downtime at work... but yeah... I actually agree, the forums are pretty shite.

Unfortunately, there are sometimes shining examples of threads where useful information is exchanged with no drama at all. It really would be a shame to lose those.

Why not just throw me out too! I am not useful in any way!

I will take the forums out west and we will do a remake of "Leaving Las Vegas".

Keep in mind that most people that reply like that are severely lacking in social skills and need to resort to sarcasm to make their points. I really wonder why people post like that when they should be doing what they do best, scripting and programming and using their L$'s to hire some PR people so they don't make themselves look so foolish on the forums. After reading the STEAM forums and hearing the 13 year old CounterStrike players act like this, I've just learnt to ignore them and move on to adult replies.

I agree with what you are saying although I do get a lot of unintential laughs and personality insight from the actions of some peoples posts which help influence my social circle and purchasing decisions in SL itself.

The point being, those kinds of exchanges could happen on any community forum and for the cost, I'd rather see LL spending time on bugs, graphics, and enhancements.... not moderating the forums.

So Cienna, I presume this means you are volunteering the time, network bandwidth, servers and other equipment and system administration skills to start and maintain the replacement forums? Along with the migration of all the existing userbase (which by the way you will need to integrate with SL's existing user database so that in-game av names and passwords are used) and cull through the current forums so that all the existing "good" threads can be moved over?

Great! Let us know when you're done with that!

Sometimes sarcasm is the best way to make your point. Blowing it off as "juvenile" is even more juvenile - at least have the decency to respond to the points rather than resort to ad hominem responses with your noses in the air.

What's so wrong with the forums? Honestly. A ton of useful information gets exhanged here. Flame wars aren't as common as they used to be. I love these forums. They're an integral part of SL to me. I think the function they serve is important enough to be worth the investment by LL.

These forums serve many purposes, not the least of which is giving people who cannot be in-world all the time an external link to the community of SL. I work 50-60 hours a week and have 2 small children so you can guess my SL in-world time right now is quite limited. I don't post much either (for all the same reasons), but I do feel connected by reading the many interesting (and quite often informative) posts and threads on here. I can read during lulls at work or during lunch hours. And I have used these forums on numerous occasions to find answers to building and scripting questions I had.

Aside from all my personal reasons for keeping the forums (which of course is a non-issue anyway because they aren't going anywhere), the "cost" and "man hours" you keep saying is so high to maintain and moderate the forums is really quite low. First of all it's all reactive moderation; each post is instantly posted and only when something is noticed after the fact is it editted or removed (if necessary). Server space and bandwidth for a forum this size is so incredibly cheap nowadays it's not even worth mentioning. I could set this whole thing up in a matter of hours and pay roughly $10 a month to keep it going.

Anyway, if you truly feel threads like this keep SL staff too busy to take care of real issues, just don't post and help keep this sort of social interaction to a minimum. By the way, just the act of several of us posting like this, backing each other up to defend the forums, is a testament to their power to augment the community of SL.

Adamantly against this. Newbie though I may be to SecondLife, I come from another years-established online game called Jumpgate. Still going, as far as I know, but barely alive.

This game, too, once sported parent-provided community forums. However along-about last year they decided that it was not worth to "man hours" to maintain community aspects in the forums, and removed all the forums that did not regard the game directly. Basically, imagine if SL's forums were cut down to only what's under the "Linden forums", this place, Events, and Tech support. Very bare-bones.

Now, for a game limping along on it's last legs that might be acceptable. However I found that the game overall became less enjoyable with the social parts of the forums chopped out. Online numbers hovered around 50 for peak hours before, and after that it seemed to be a strain to get it up to 30.

SecondLife does not seem to show any such signs of impending death staved off with naught but a stick (Jumpgate's "stick" being called Istvan. Kudos, man, where-ever you are.) It is alive and thriving quite well enough, it seems, to not only support but /merit/ having these types of social forums for it's users. There are thousands, after all!

As others are pointing out, a lot of good and useful information changes hands here every day. Newbies find reading material to absorb and soften the learning curve and to help adapt to the social atmosphere (every game has it's own unique one,) and that saves Help volunteers and Lindens having to skitter about to support them live.

And like it or not, the drama has it's purpose as well. For some that's the attractant. Not neccessarily to participate or to perpetuate the drama, but to watch and read with a bemused grin. Like a great big soap opera. Without that aspect of entertainment the whole thing becomes hollow and boring.

Summarily, the forums have something for everyone; some use, some purpose, some value, to everyone. Newbies, builders, gossips, and argumentative stinkers alike.

I've found these forums very valuable for user-to-user support. Several of the things I've made rely on things I found in the forums, starting with my invisiprim-heavy av that makes people's eyes bug out regularly. I doubt I would've been able to track down the invisiprim script wthout the forums; it would've required a concerted search that I would've likely lost interest in before I found out it existed for sure. It's also where I found Chip Midnight's skin templates, which I've found invaluable in my baby steps into texturing, and any number of examples of how to make things that I've adapted for my own purposes.

Yes, there are flame-loving blowhards. I ignore 'em.

& just *what* am I supposed to do at work without the forums? WORK??? HA! It's bad enough SL shuts down the entire internal department & I am limited to the forums.

Even when flame wars were more common, the forums still provided useful info. There's no good reason to get rid of these forums. I doubt the Lindens would consider the idea.

I find these forums to be vast wealths of information and functionality. These forums (up till now I have just been lurking) appear to help remove some of the interpersonal tension that can build up in game. IMHO, holding a flame war on the forums in all text vs. being attacked in SL by weapons and such is much easier to deal with, not having to deal with llTeleportAgentHome scripts while trying to resolve issues is a plus in my book. The forums also provide insight to the residents of SL, what their manners are, if they are easy to talk to, do they hold grudges and all sorts of personal characteristics which is higly valuable in knowing who to avoid, who to play nice with and those residents that are just there. The forums also provide a pathway for news that isn't told in-world , I never knew most of the stuff going on in-world untill I started to read the forums ( I spend way too much time building). The forums also allow for the community to voice itself and represent itself with little moderation. I have lurked on forums where there was such an intese amount of moderation that no one could post anything halfway near honest. So in my eyes, the forums are worth keeping around, besides it looks like Linden Labs is using a 3rd party vendor, so the support issues won't have to include maintaining the actual software code (I dunno if this is relevent or not).

These forums should be removed.

They have caused more division, more in world hostilities, more canceled accounts, than any other 10 factors in SL put together. Why should a company spend time and money on a feature that would cause them to lose customers?

In Linden Lab's role as a hosting provider, their message board should be limited to technical support response and announcements.

When Everquest removed its official forums there was an instant improvement in customer relations, and in the community as a whole. The program went on to be one of the most successful on-line communities ever.

Let the community pick up the slack. There are many user created web sites that could be and are already providing this feature.

Who are you, Editorial Hare? Are you a player? Are you a player's alt?

I ask, because due to your name, I used to think you had some sort of official capacity. I think it was due also to something you said, or someone else said - somewhere along the line something was said to give me the impression that Editorial Hare was someone who came down from above somewhere to give unbiased judgments about things. Something somewhere fooled me.

I don't think that anymore.

coco

Indeed. I cancled my account twice from what I read in the forums.. Oh wait .. I came back... Nevermind.

Seriously though, I doubt enough people read the forums to make a significant impact on SL accounts one way or the other. Well, directly, anyways. They are a good way of exchanging ideas and providing technical support that has, in my opinion, lead to higher quality content inside the game. This also affects account retention.