Should they just go ahead and open the General Forum back up?

Sort of like a chat room, eh?

I used to be in a chat room that looked a great deal like this forum. I think it was sort of a forum tortured and hammered into being a chatroom. You had a window always at the bottom to make your comment in, like our edit fields but only 4 or 5 lines tall, , but the New Comment field always opened up . Once you pressed send, the entire page would redisplay. To see if others added a message, you had to reload the page. You could set it to reload automatically at intervals.

At any time, including right at the start of session, you could tell it to show the history, back maybe a thousand messages. It only kept around a thousand messages in the history.

So you could get off of work on Friday, get something to eat, smoke a cigarette, get a beer, then join the chat and look back at the history and find out what the night's topics were. By the time you'd looked at the history your beer would be taking effect, putting you in a proper mood to enter your message quickly before someone said something that messed up witty quip or pithy riposte.

Having a history, but only a short one, like a day at most, is a nice compromise between the permanent record of a forum like this one and the pure stream of consciousness style you mention.

I wish you could check the past thousand messages (or a days worth ) of group messages when you open a group chat, to see what the buzz was, and avoid bringing up something already talked about enough in the past hours.

Of course nowadays I'd be content concerning group chat I could see the current group chat and post to it.

I guess a question relevant to this discussion is who are these forums *FOR*?

If they are for us the residents, why the heck should we have to ask and beg for a GD forum and assume we won't get one, we should just tell them we need one. The forums hosting fee has already been paid after all.

If they aren't for us .. who are they for? Makes me wonder.

I'm a little curious of the reasoning for the 5 no votes. . . . . . . . .

The Chidrenz! Think of The Chidrenz!!!

Moderator

I'm guessing people who think we should stick it out until we get a real GD forum rather than taking over a currently unused forum.

I can Hypothesize about some reasons - Ill try to be fair.

There are a lot of people who feel Resident Answers never should have been General Discussion at all. And that the moderation should have stayed strict. Or that we should be "adults" enough to strictly moderate ourselves.

There are others who agreed with LL's decision to close the General Forum on 9/11/06

There are some who are fine with Resident Answers/GD 2008 as it stands now.

There are some people who just don't like me and will vote against any poll I start

and Finally;

there are always people who will vote contrary to the majority of any poll just because.

Shocked! How can someone have issues with shoes?

I love to have a matching purse with mine.

I'm guessing it may be people who think we should stick it out to get a real General Discussion Forum rather than taking one over.

Others have expressed in the past their concern that if we have a General Forum then no one will be in RA to answer questions. Personally, I think this is just silly.

I'm sorry can you be a bit more clear? Maybe I'm a little dense (LOL) but what do you mean by moderator?

well this poll is about them opening a real General Discussion forum, rather than Resident Answers.

Least I thought it was.

The "sacrifice of Town hall" I mentioned later was just so they could close a forum to satisfy their ego when they open up General Discussion.

I voted no because I was here with the old GD and it was an absolute mess.

Oh, I misunderstood. I thought you were suggesting that we hijack an unused forum. Silly me, I don't know how I got that.

*Scurries off to edit his nonsensical first response.

So you don't read it then. Problem solved.

I rather enjoy the banter that goes on in here, but it would be less intimidating to be able to ask a question knowing it will be answered and the topic not getting dragged off into some dark place and getting flogged sensless ... not that that has ever happened to me ... erm ... yet ...

... yeah ... anyway, a general discussion thread would be fun

So make a SL GD forum elsewhere. Problem solved.

Well I am hoping it's not the last one and the people who chose no had a valid reason for doing so. I just would have liked to have heard the argument.

don't know if this has been asked in this thread, but if they had a GD, would everyone go there to ask Residents Questions?

I visualise it as a forum, with threads and posts in the threads, but with just one page. A thread could have 4689876 reples but once it scrolled off the page it would be consigned to oblivion.

A popular thread might last days and be nurtured by people - in a way like a game of "keep the baloon aloft."

It is that. Most here truly enjoy helping, and those that only want to see the questions and answers will be motivated to stick around. I doubt many people , other than me would probably not be seen as much in RA.

The Resident Answers forum would benefit more from being neat and tidy than a General Discussion forum would IMHO.

that answered my question then

That sounds like a add-on to forums called a chat box

That's exactly what we did. We declared RA to be the new GD... don't like it? Tell LL to make us an official GD forum.

There is already a great SL GD forum and an off topic forum. They're over at SLUniverse. Great moderator over there too.

I doubt GD will ever return here. I've still yet to see much evidence that LL gives a crap about its customers, with the rare exception like Torley.