What is the official position on devs in Forum Suggestions?

A little musing from another thread in which the guys made a terrific easy-win suggestion ...

I find quite perplexing the occasional, seemingly random appearances of devs on the forums. The forum-related strategies that make some kind of sense to me are, perhaps:

1. Total dev absence, maybe because of a company directive to not engage the customers here, either because forum browsing wastes dev time, or because commenting on suggestions might indicate LL acceptance, or because Cory runs a strict ship and nothing else is allowed to affect direction, or even because the forums are regarded as totally boring and we are not worthy.

1. Regular dev presence, not necessarily meaning regular posting, but certainly regular enough to be able to pick up the very easy wins like llDetectedTouchPos(), and actually state "Good idea guys, I'll add this to the customer-request list, but no guarantees of course." It would save us a lot of followup effort and frustration, and of course it would save LL more browsing effort, which the "regular dev presence" interpretation assumes anyway.

1. Bug-fix and newbie-help only presence, ie. only the bug hunters and direct front-line staff browse the forums looking for bug reports or newbies in trouble. This is a common strategy in ISPs in their forums and newgroups.

1. Official Customer Relations staffer presence only, everything goes through him so no devs (nor anyone else from the company) ever appears on the forums, but it does have the benefit that absolutely everything gets browsed as that's his job. I've seen that work semi-reasonably in one MMOG, although it has the downside that the official becomes incredibly powerful and his personal preferences skew everything.

1. There is an official internal LL directive that the forums are purely for allowing customers to let off steam and so to relieve their frustrations while continuing to pay the subscription.

Clearly none of the first four operate on their own here, and the last one is both uncharitable and lacking in vision so I'm striking that one off, which makes the role of a forum like this one particularly confusing.

Maybe F.S. should be renamed Feature Suggestions Randomly Read And Randomly Considered by Random People on Random Days?

Very odd.

[Edit: Typo on the thread title: I intended to write "Feature Suggestions", although maybe "Forum Suggestions" isn't wrong since great ideas appear all over the forums.]

They read, and sometimes they post. The Linden (dev) post level has been fairly constant for well over a year. With feature suggestions, there's no need for them to post. They only comment when there's something that needs their input AND their input doesn't cause controversy or false hopes. I've found they are more likely to post on a feature when it is almost or already in the bag. As always on company-run forums, what they say is always restricted by what is in the best interest for the company. (And making certain (paying!) users happy by responding to their comments/requests/demands isn't necessarily in the company's best interest, "cusomer is always right" or not.)

They do listen to our input, though. That's obvious. But the time needed to discuss, design, and implement changes suggested here makes the turn-around time quite long. Especially right now when there's a hold on new major features until early next year.

Now because of that long delay, sometimes ideas suggested here are forgotten by those Lindens that read about them. To that end, I've been toying with the idea of making an off-site or in-world database of ideas. So they don't get forgotten. But maybe someone else has the time to do that, because I don't.

Tiger, such an ideas site might be extremely valuable as a more general open resource for the community metaverse, beyond the niche inhabited by Second Life.

LL would of course be able to harness it as much as anyone else (if they wished), and even to contribute, but this independence would provide the additional benefit of not being constrained by some of the design and business decisions that LL have made on the way.

The metaverse transcends the business goals of any one corporation, and is more a reflection of the desire of people and communities to re-embody themselves in virtual 3D worlds than an interest in being mere consumers of online products.

Even this discussion should, for most appropriate effect, be held in a more metaplace.