New Xstreet forums open

I've no reason to believe that he is. Most of the office hours I've been to recently have had one Linden or another asking about communication tools -- I've gotten the impression it's become a company-wide mandate to promote the whole "turn SL into a RL social networking tool" project. I did wonder why he was co-hosting the special office hours, but I don't know enough about who's in charge of what to make any assumptions there.

Yes, it is. But at least it exists, and is fairly powerful. I haven't found any search for the new forums.

I'm sure there's one . . . somewhere . . .

whoa...

did i just see a Beezle?

/me waves

Displeasure over teal-on-white text brought me here to complain

The blog search is at https://blogs.secondlife.com/search/.

Once there click the "More Options" link. That will cause options for What, Where, When and Who to appear.

"Where" will let you s e l e c t what part of the blogs to search in. The Community so-called Forums are part of the blog system and do appear in the drop down box.

Also check the search tips, at https://blogs.secondlife.com/search-tips.jspa . The tips are too long for me to want to post them in this thread but the search options you can enter into the search box are far more powerful than the search we've been allowed to use for this forum.

You can even use parenthesized Boolean logic expressions.

It's a shame it has the awkward drop down box s e l ec t i o n. It should have a "Search this forum" or "Search whatever level you are at in the hierarchy" function. If they expect anyone but search geeks to use the advanced functions, the search tips need to be more prominent. Even just a bigger link to them would help.

I haven't tried but a few simple commands there, and of course theirs not much to search, so far as posts and replies from users go. I'm assuming it won't search the old Xstreet forum; if so, almost all the useful information won't be returned by the search system. This will get corrected over time, but it means the effective destruction of history, a thing which seems to me to be happening everywhere in all walks of life.

Well, it's good to see any search system that still allows parenthesized Boolean search. Now if only one could search for spaces and punctuation marks. How can one get a search engine to return questions when you can't search for a question mark?

Lol that would probably be a lot to read. I've read quite a bit as when I started SL this was where I tried to grab the pulse of the community. I kept an open mind on personalities so I would not get distracted on various views. I guess it was kind of an average I saw I suppose. Also I can't claim to know the dynamics on peoples personal relationships, or history with other posters either I guess.

-and a partridge in a pear tree.

In case it's of interest, Blue posted a reply to Nika's thread on the Commerce forums, at https://blogs.secondlife.com/message/10820#10820; excerpt:

So, I dunno. It has an awfully long way to go to be usable, but to be fair, it *does* have features lacking in these Forums. Right now those features are hard to find and use, but the whole project just might be something that adds a lot more value than conventional forums software can deliver without a ton of back-end integration.

Can they really invest what it takes to see the project through to success? It's kind of difficult to imagine, but right now I'm feeling that it's premature to decide it can never happen. The poor XstreetSL folks, though, and those who are trying to make Second Life Answers work... it's all so clumsy now that I marvel anybody has the patience to continue.

I wish they'd share more of the vision, to give us more incentive to try.

Yeah that is kinda clumsy looking. Its still not too hard to get around but it doesn't seem very user friendly. I would assume that its just their test throw to the public and they'll refine it. I don't know how those types of web pages work so I don't know how much more refining can be done. It does look like a rough draft tho.

For those who are following this thread and not the Blogrum, here's my response to Blue's post there. I had already posted, after a fairly aggressive OP, some suggestions for improvement. But I don't know that I will bother to continue that.

Like?



We ARE talking about Linden Lab here, right? O.o

I'm glad you quoted yourself, as I refuse to look at "that site". Very well said, and it sums up my feelings as well. I was very hopeful when I had my chat with Blue a few months back, but I realize it was a wasted effort now. They didn't even take our suggestions and dismiss them which I could accept. We were flat out ignored.

That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. LL has been in this same "we want your feedback" > /dev/null for a few years now. Once upon a time, there existed a LL which would actually LISTEN once in a while to what residents were saying and reconsider what were patently obvious ill-considered actions, but the current regime is completely and totally out of touch and out to lunch.

Just wanted to say thanks for the time and effort you put into this anyways. You were the very last cheerleader after we had all finally given up. I am just sorry that all of your work may be for naught.

Seconded here, Thanks Nika I know just how you feel after all the fight with the adult changes, just to be shafted by the Lab in the end

I figured that when the XStreet forums moved LL would bring us something more original than a retread of Yahoo Answers. I'm disappointed.

For all I know, Blue was accurately and sincerely describing a LL policy position that actually will be implemented precisely as suggested here. I have no knowledge of any evidence to the contrary.

But I can't help noting that these remarks, with particulars changed, could appear prominently in any highly-regarded public/customer relations textbook, as a stellar example of How to Keep Your Customers Quiet Until They Just Go Away and Are Replaced By More Compliant Customers.

Yeah. I know.

The thing is, I genuinely like Blue and am strongly inclined to believe he intends to deliver on what he says. (I'm less confident that there will be the kind of resources available long enough to actually make it happen; I'd be unable to construct a compelling enough business case to defend that investment against other priorities.)

Tal asked what I might mean about the new flogs/forgs/blorums potentially having features not easily replicated with conventional forums software. I *really* wish LL would give us something concrete to go on here, but I'll take a shot:

It's long been a problem that recorded knowledge about SL has been scattered hither and yon: the Forums, the Wiki, the Knowledge Base, the viewer's contextual Help and tooltips, the ToS/CS, the Blog, and even the jira. Where should somebody with a question look for an answer? And how do they come to know that?

For example, from experience, many of us will try to search the pjira for some explanation of whatever wackiness we're seeing, before searching elsewhere or asking a question--but how the hell do we explain to a newcomer how to judge when that's appropriate?

Why isn't all of it searchable in one site: -specific space? Well, one stupid reason is that they exclude the Forums from web spidering... so if one uses Google to find an answer, it's guaranteed not to be from the Forums. So that would be easy to fix--but if one indexes one's own site, a lot more is possible, especially for content from structured, interlinked sources.

It would probably be dreaming to imagine that somebody in LL understands Semantic Web, but still: if they're able to pull together forums and "answers" and blog into one content management system... and somehow glue in the wiki with something more than surface-grammar links... they could have a pretty comprehensive and coherent body of SL knowledge. Further integration with the jira would be another challenge, but I think necessary.

It's not as if this will be The SL Singularity And Second-Coming or anything, but it could have all kinds of utility. And not just for end users: imagine yourself a new developer, handed a bit of functionality to implement; if you could search for related functionality by some means more efficient than scanning the codebase, you'd be less likely to screw the pooch with code that steps on other features or breaks user-generated content.

As the feature set scales, and as the rate of new user entry accelerates (please God), the value increases of having all that knowledge readily accessible.

I like him too,he was very friendly and engaging, and he didn't dance around any of my questions. And his bear is the coolest one I have....I only have 2, but that's not important.But I feel that his bosses are a different story. I do not think they give a flying prim about anything we have to say.

QFT and I agree that Blue is approachable etc. Its the upper management that suck imho

Blue acts in a context into which we have no visibility - I don't know what his priorities are. I think Blue is a decent human being who thinks all humans should be treated with respect. I don't know that he thinks any of our opinions are worth anything on their own merits. I don't know what types of residents, if any, he permits to influence his own thinking. And yes, agreed on the resources issue - but they have a brand new VP for the website, and that VP's honeymoon may provide a longer stint of development than usual.Most of what you are describing is classic information consolidation. It would be both:
A. Very VERY nice
B. Possible to do with conventional software

LL has never shown any interest in creating the sort of searchable knowledge store that would be of overwhelming value, as you describe. If they had any interest in it at all, they would have fixed the wiki search long ago, and would have found a way to transform the content in the LSL wiki and scripting forum into coherent content (it's only ONE part-time tech writer's contract away from being a resource so valuable they could make it a marketing point).

I think the primary driver behind the new website is branding. As SL ages, LL needs to buttress up their image as a Web 3.0 leader; the fact that their website was stone-age made that image unsupportable. I also think they want to facilitate more instant communication between all the media they support, more linkage, both inworld and out. I think that's what the Dashboard is for, and the obvious next step there is to make it user-configurable.

Eventually I suppose one will be able to, using just LL tools, twitter from SL, have your avatar participate in a RL videoconference, send an SL Answer to email, export pictures to facebook, import contacts from social networking sites, issue invites to an SL meeting that reach people's outlook, etc..

Go to the source of the FLog software and look at the blurbs in the right-hand panel on this page:
http://www.jivesoftware.com/products

p.s. I think I'll cross-post this to my thread in the Flog.
.

If they spent the resources of one decent programmer for a year, they could have done that years ago. I don't care what their internal server code looks like, gluing it to the numerous open-source tools that support standard protocols... SMTP, IMAP, XMPP, IRC, and so on... would be easy, and once that's done the integration of SL into the Internet infrastructure would happen more or less automatically. Reimplementing all these tools, as badly as they have done with SLim, is doomed.

Of course, there's no obvious way to find that link while reading the forums, and I'm certainly not going to click on something that says "blog search" when what I want to do is to search the forums, not the blogs.

If they renamed "blog search" to "Forum search" would that be an improvement