the forums

The content creation forums are a low cost way of providing information that is extremely useful in getting the content needed to make the Second Life world be of any interest to casual observers for free or by customers who actually pay them.

In other words, since we users will voluntary, without pay, write high quality guides to how to use Photoshop and Gimp and Paintshop and Poser and 3D Studio Max, etc., Linden Lab doesn't need to.

I suspect that if the plug were pulled on these forums, folks actually would pick out third party forums and the free documention and support process would continue elsewhere. There would be a problem caused by the loss of the existing information in the third party forums. Folks won't just switch to a third party "Scripting Tips" forum simply because one exists, though; in order to have a reason to do so, the Linden Lab forum with years of existing posts would need to be unavailable. Folks have had such third party forums in existence for years and they get very little use, for the obvious reason that there's a better forum already in existence.

The number of people that use the forums is a tiny percentage of the SL userbase. There are a few folks that seem to think that they need a chatroom, a place for throw away comments of no lasting value, and that the only place acceptable to have their private chatroom in is the support forums for users with questions about how to use Second Life. For some reason they aren't capable of deriving the same pleasure from registering at an inworld kiosk to verify their SL identity and conducting their chat sessions in a forum paid for by someone other than Linden Lab for the purpose of being a chat room. A large part of the pleasure seems to come from knowing that they are breaking the rules. Others just like to argue, endlessly taking contrary positions from what others say, or from what they themselves said the other day, apparently because they like to hear the sound of their own typing.

Others like to use the forums as a place to plan, advertise, and review their land owning groups events. One group in particular abuses the forums in this manner repeatedly with no apparent objection from Linden Lab, despite this preferential treatment being grossly and blatantly inequitable since the many thousands of other groups aren't allowed to use the Resident Answer forum as a private group planning and advertising forum.

Linden Lab doesn't seem to have much ability to say what the mean and mean what they say, it seems to like to say one thing and ignore it, or to say two obviously contradictory things and mostly ignore both of them, picking one or the other rule to enforce when they want and then when necessary making up a third idea from the clear blue sky.

The way the Resident answers forums are being handled - largely unmoderated so far as enforcing the spirit or rules in the Forum Guidelines and Resident Answers sticky - as of 1-9-08 is much less satisfying to me than a forum where the forum that is described as being for support requests has support requests and not throwaway chatroom talk.

I think the advertising value, or at least the perceived advertising value, of forum posting shouldn't be overlooked as an explanation of why some folks want to to have a forum with endless blathering and bickering and droning on and on having the same regularly scheduled arguments they had last week with the same people on the same topics calling each other the same names. It's because they have ads in their signatures, and they mention their businesses. Their name gets displayed over and over. It makes them feel like celebrities, and they think, possibly correctly, that it increases the sale of their SL products.

Some of the folks that want endless blathering forums used to engage is such regular repetitious arguments that it was pretty obvious that the parties just happened to have some otherwise spare time on the same day of the week. You could pretty much plan to catch the "Sheila Cinderson versus Arrold Backstraw versus Radislaw Inglethorpe" show in the General Discussion forum every Thursday night. The preliminary groundwork would get laid on Thursday, allowing the phony hostility to build up to a head sometime after closing time at Linden Lab on 5:30 or so Friday.

I think our communication system needs to be dramatically improved and revamped. I personally like this nice old fashioned vBulletin forum format, but it's kind of odd to have this separate, discrete system run in parallel and largely distinct from the SL virtual world. We need to have inworld access to asynchronous communcations like the forums, like and because of the great value of the existing data in the content creation forums, it should include access to these forums . We should be able to send someone a facebook message from inworld, or send them email, or chat through an IM client. If SL is going to be the 3D internet, it needs to all use of the internet and Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and social networking and online collaboration systems .

Well it's 2:30 am here, time to stop writing.

Sorry Susan, having been on many other Forums I don't see this as anydifferent, people here have actual personalites and it is fun, without fun, many questions here would be left unenswered because attendance would be only occassional for techminded people, and no point for events & classifieds.
Then again I'm probably in "that" group
Hope this just was a 2am overpost, I respect all I seen you involved in here to, how did you get your own forum too by the way, was it in a competition or something, it's a cool touch of personalisation for forums, though good thing we don't all have our own