A forum where you actually get answers from the top.....

I was going to list a string of ideas I think would improve SL, it would be nice to know if they're even feasible and then it occurred to me what's the point of suggesting things if someone from the company doesn't respond to tell you if they're possible or not. The main thing we need is a forum where a representative of Lindens actually takes time to go through the queries and reply. Its the same with all aspects of SL 'life'

I tried to get a posting about the ongoing problem of crossing region boundaries into the Linden mainland forum two days ago, it hasn't appeared and as I haven't had any sort of reponse Im just assuming it's not going to be.

So much of the resident concerns/queries aspect of the forum seems to be endless argument with little sign of resolution because there is no Linden participation.

Id love to see a forum where a question/suggestion can be posted by any SL resident but only a member of Lindens staff can respond with an answer.

Do you really think that the Lindens don't know region crossing is a pain?

If they could write a few lines of code to fix it they would.

The problem with region crossings is a simple one, all your avatars information has to be passed from one server to another on the fly, it's too much information to pass instantly.

Theres a Jira for new feature suggestions that gets regular Linden input and that they cannot really ignore due to a voting structure.

We used to have a forum where users would post questions and a Linden staff member would respond.

It was closed, owing at least in part, I suspect, to the poor behavior of many users.

Even given reasonably well behaved users, trying to answer every question that people submit is a very inefficient way to provide information. Many people make absolutely no attempt to use the forum's search function, and thus the same question appears many times. Each new post of the same old question needs a new answer if you don't want to leave the poster feeling ignored. The forum search is weak at best and crippled in addition, and since there's no attempt to keep the discussions in the forums on topics related to the use of the Second Life virtual world, even those who use the search system as it is don't always find what they are looking for in the midst of hundreds of thousands of posts of irrelevant drivel, nationalist bigotry, nick-picking, drunken ranting, personal attacks, etc.

Man-hours are better spent in producing high quality information that's presented one time, in an organized fashion, which is what LL did with the Knowledge Base and Torley's video tips and the wiki. Having spent a fair bit of time reading the SL documentation for the past five years, I'd say they've improved the documentation tremendously, and the Knowledge Base is actually pretty good overall. Many of the articles in the KB are quite well written, well illustrated, and cover their topics quite well. Despite these clear, concise, and complete articles, which appear in the KB search system's results using logical, not hard to think of search terms, questions about these topics that are answered completely in the KB article are asked over and over and over again in the forums. I think for Linden Lab to spend money paying staff to answer these questions over and over and over again would be stupid.

It might be possible to have a system in which one would email their questions to LL, and each day one or two questions would be picked to get an answer. That might make for good reading, for those who like reading about Second Life, but it wouldn't really serve your purpose.

If you have a feature suggestion, a reasonable approach, in my view, is to first post it in the Features Suggestion forum, not in the hopes that LL will read it and reply, but so that people can offer input that helps you improve your feature suggestion. You should expect to have a bunch of nay-sayers, nattering nabobs of negativism, tear your suggestion to shreds, often without seeming to understand it. Just don't respond to them at all. Some folks might offer constructive criticism, or take off on the riff and extend it in a way that you like but didn't think of. The specific wording of the suggestion is very important, as distinct from the actual idea; for example, if you are making a suggestion about online presence viewability, do not use the word invisible anywhere in your suggestion, because someone or ones will start talking about invisible avatars spying on you in your sex pose bed.

During this time one should also search for related ideas, topics, keywords, etc. in both the Jira and the wiki, and read not just the main page that comes up in the search, but also the comments. There's lots of good info in the comments.

Once you've worked over your initial suggestion into a form that seems clear and unambiguous and added enough clarifying and qualifying clauses to it so that it's understood properly and heads off obvious but unfruitful opposition themes, then you post it in the Jira system.

At that point, you post a new thread about the Jira issue, and put a short description and link in your forum signature, and post about it the sluniverse.com forums, and make a twitter post about it, and post about it in the Second Life groups in Facebook, and so on.

You put a watch in the Jira system so that you get email notification about the jira issue, and respond to comments as appropriate.

I think the Linden staff does read some of the jira issues; there are numerous responses to them, and some of the ideas presented by users do get incorporated into code.

I've gotten responses from Linden staff members to some of my attempts to communicate with them. I filed so many bug reports, back in the days of the old in-viewer bug report system, that the bug response team sent me email and contacted me in-world to help find out about the problem and attempt a solution. Thank goodness the quality of my technical problems I have has improved since then.

There are in-world meetings where us common folks can type to Linden staff members and get typed back at, you just have to arrange to be in-world at the appropriate time, which is often during the workday for folks near the SLT time zone.

It is possible to send inworld IMs and or notecards to many Linden staff members. Whether you get an answer depends on what you write and who you send it to.

Hmmmm and yet they enable people to jump between worlds to much hurrahing.... Im sure many others wished they would tackle boundary crossing in world...

This is true, yet connecting with other people on the forum is part of that "find a friend and stay in Second Life" process and so has value beyond the mere answering of questions.

That's true, Osprey, forums do a good job at things the KB and other relatively static data don't do a good job of.

It should be pretty obvious that I like forums.secondlife.com .

I do, too, although I am not sure why.
Maybe you should write a post about searching: "How to Search" or "Are you looking for some information?" I think people sometimes need help getting started, and might forget that googling is very useful for some things.