So why did you first come to the SL Forums?

Wasn't able to find my first post, but near the beginning, it was posting problem sites for the Lindens back then, before they had Moles. I was exploring and would find broken content, and LH got tired of me, told me to go to the forums and report it..

Yer welcome!



It's like the old joke about business cards at a printer's convention: no one remembers to run their own cards, as they're busy running orders.

It looked like a good place to hide from the Animal Control van.

Which reminds me: your damaged content page on the wiki may be a touch outdated. At least one new repair (Morris archery range!) and a couple new damage spots (Encleadus waterfall!)

I first came here under my alt account, mostly lurking, back in July. I asked a couple of questions and got some answers. I kept checking back, reading threads, looking for topics of interest. Then I read about old accounts getting a L$500 weekly stipend, so I tried to find my old account that I had, to see if it was within that range. This was that account, and I created it about a week before the drop of the stipend allowance, so I was lucky. Have stayed logged in here at the forums with him ever since, even though I still tend to use the alt in world.

I still do the same, lurk mostly, read threads, laugh at much of the drama here, and post when something interests me.

i first came because someone, at the shelter, i think, said this was a good place to find information....spent hours reading the stickies, especially the "5 tips for the newly born", and the "Frequently Asked Questions"

i've been lurking ever since....loved that i could come here and read in spare moments at work when i was missing SL...giggle

this forum has been so helpful to me...and i've sent tons of new people here to read the stickies....i'm gonna miss this when it is closed....alot...sigh

Before I came to SL, I had been active for 5 years or so with an on-line roleplaying community that used a Forum environment for text roleplay. It was limited to PG-13 activity, though sometimes, when a post indicated "Fade to black...", the participants might take it further via ICQ chat or other more private communications channels. I had over a dozen accounts on that forum, so I could roleplay as various characters, and two of my accounts were in the top 15 or so posters of all time there, having posted more than most of the founding members. I was an active forum administrator, and one of my most common roles was as a guide and helper for newcomers. I liked helping others to learn, and I still do.

When one of my favorite people to RP with in those fora rapidly vanished, and I found that she was spending all her time in SL now, I followed her here. I became active in the forums here, much as I had been in the old forums where I used to RP, learning a lot from the various Tips fora and the Resident Answers section, and in time doing what I could to help others here.

My day-job in RL is very oriented to providing customer satisfaction and enabling others to get the most out of their efforts. I also like to teach, and I'm pretty good at explaining complex topics to others. It's been a natural fit for me to spend much of my free time learning from others and trying to help others with what I have learned.

LL had a perfectly good set of forums here, that they just didn't want to maintain, upgrade, and moderate properly. As a former forum admin, I have no sympathy for them at all with their whining about how hard it would be to maintain or moderate these fora. If a handful of unpaid volunteers at the Fora that I used to RP in could run an extremely busy set of fora there, with decent yet not heavy-handed moderation and keeping all the software up to date, I can't see why a group of people who are getting PAID to run a set of forums and their servers and software can't do at least as well as our volunteers did.

But what LL proposes to replace these fora with isn't worth the time to bother posting over there. It isn't a forum, it's a blog. The software may be perfectly adequate for running a blog, with a handful of people allowed to post, and only a handful of replies to each post. But it is ill-suited to running a forum with thousands or even millions of participants all actively posting and discussing topics. So when they shut this set of fora down, they will lose me, and a great number of others who freely gave their time and experience to benefit others. Because they refuse to listen to their customers, and refuse to acknowledge the many flaws that render their blog/forum bastardization useless and hopelessly frustrating to use.

I haven't decided where I will go next, but it won't be to those blogs.

As for SL? I'm seriously considering withdrawing the few items I have on XStreet-SL, and moving my virtual sales to some other web service, where LL doesn't control access or discussion. I'll continue living and working in SL as long as my friends in-world remain, and as long as people still buy my textures and hire me to build for them. But if there was an alternative? A viable virtual world run by almost anyone other than LL, that offered at least as much as LL does? I'd be gone in a heartbeat.

Like many I first came here ( back in 2007 with my original avatar ) looking for help.

I got the help I needed and read some of the other threads and have been hooked ever since.

Mostly a lurker but I post now and then.

I'm going to be terribly sad when they close these forums, its a familiar place to come to and learn and laugh and sometimes get pi*s*ed off

I've looked at the new "forums" but I can't even see that they are forums, unreadable at best. Hell, I couldn't even figure out how to reply to a topic let alone start my own.

These are so readable and easy to navigate.

/me shakes his head sadly, I wish they'd just leave Resident Answers up and ignore it so we could wage war on one anther with impunity and then have a love fest to make up afterwards

I love you all, even the ones I disagree with all the time, and I'll miss you when this forum is gone. I'll try to find you in the new Dashboard.

If everyone moves to a new forum I hope someone remembers Handy and lets me know


Cheers,
Handy

i came to the forums as a source of information. the very first time i ever posted a true question, i was reamed in the forum and with in world im's. needless to say i didnt post after that incident for a long time. while i like the info shared here, i do not like the venom.

I first asked a question in the forums because, as a landless SL wanderer, I was looking for places to change clothes.

Everyone was so helpful, and made me feel very welcome. And so...I stayed.

The SL forum was my first experience with online forums. I'm glad I found it.

Ooooh, I found the thread! /327/77/243685/1.html

Thankies.. I should take a look at it, but the LL's were not looking at the wiki either, so sort of stopped bothering them with it.

I'm glad you stayed! You're always so pleasant to read amidst the not so pleasant things the forums can have at times.

QFT. These forums aren't huge. To be honest, 1 person working 8 hours a day could manage the whole thing (maybe even less than 8 hours, if they didn't bother to read every post every day.) The least you have to do is check on the posts Reported, take care of any moderating, stickying, etc, and be on your merry way.

I can only assume LL sees it as a huge job because they want to take it much further, carefully reviewing, modifying and removing any and every bit of information they feel falls outside their carefully crafted ideas about what is right and proper from their own corporate perspective. That *is* a job outside the scope of what anyone could hope to do. Nor should it even be considered.

No company is or should ever be able to restrict or filter any and all information concerning them, their services or that of their competitors.

You can go to the World of Warcraft forums now, they have literally well over 300 forum sections, they are moderated, and the developers actively post and participate with the customers in the forums themselves. People complain, people talk about WoW's competitors, and can be highly critical of what Blizzard does. However, you don't see Blizzard removing such posts, restricting them, or behaving badly over it in any way.

Blizzard truly is a model for how a company should interact with their user base, and that is why they have over 12 million subscribers, because they listen to their user base, and are capable of seeing the wisdom that comes forth from that crowd. Do they do every single thing that the users want? Not at all. But they listen, and when they can't, they give good, concrete, solid reasons for why. They don't treat their users like unwashed masses, but as equals, and that is something LL needs to learn, badly.

EDIT: and yes, Blizzard has really, really nice forums, I should add, with quoting, and everything.

Feel free to search my JIRA entries. Working on a big Nova Albion one now.

I needed help with deviants in Mimas who were griefing me. I came here and guess what? The deviants on the forum couldn't help me.

Then I realized people here needed me. I rose out of the pixil sea like Aphrodite and have been charming all of you ever since that fateful day in 2006.

Several years of medical forums before this one. This at it's very worst is child's play compared to those forums which can be horrible. I came and asked a question in Scripting Tips, then another and another, eventually the questions turned into answers and I have been here ever since.

I came because, though I'd never participated in a forum regularly before, it was clear that I would need big-time help to understand SL. So I made a couple of nerdy threads. But I stayed because it was so fun when I had green fairy hair stuck to my head:

/327/ee/160040/1.html

Thank you!
.

I can't remember a specific issue bringing me here. Being a gamer for years, I just naturally gravitate towards the forums for the particular applications I am involved with. I don't post much, but RA and XStreetSL GD were the next two stops after going through email, to catch up on the buzz. Guess that just leaves RA now. I don't do blogs...

I wish I could see more than 200 results in a search.. tried going back to see Oki's first post, but it would take hours of manual sifting =(

Oh, wow... to think it's been 2 years since I was even Oki... I still consider her to be my 'main', more than Keira is, though she was banned long ago.

Aha! Checking back at only threads started by Oki...

It appears I was looking for work, as a builder and craptastic scripter. My original, very firstest post that I can find is me looking for work... and looking over that list of my posts brings back so many memories. My crappy club, three weeks into my SL experience, my french friend who I could only understand thanks to the Babbler she gave me... Sindi, who was the person who brought me here, who has since moved on, so much more...

I'm going to go get lost in my old posts... thank you for asking this...

And I came because I wanted to share how wonderful it is, finding love and support in SL.



And if anyone has trouble with that picture, hey, LL can shut the forums in horror! Oh, wait ... nvm!