Poll: Would you rather see content creation forums & tech help listed before RA?

Seeing how I have to do a poll to get "broad support," I will.

I suggested that the content creation forums get listed before Resident Answers because we frequently get posts that are more appropriately placed in another forum. The usual suspects of late has been Texturing Tips, but very often it's Building Tips or Products Wanted. Technical discussions do not belong in RA, as it would make reading this forum harder than it already is. Plus since some pissants can't see how "please post this in Texturing Tips (or whatever other forum)" is actually helpful, this would save us more of those kinds of arguments.

So please vote, or explain your solution.

I think it's fine to go before RA. But should it go before or after the newly revived General Discussion forum?

General isn't going to happen. RA will be the default new general, because of human nature.

That was my point. RA is the new GD.

I agree that General will never come back.

I'd rather have the content creation ones up top. That means I'd not wander here out of sheer habit ...

I'd like to see the Linden Links section completely gone. We can find the blog via the login screen and the rest of it is lumped into the idiotic Support Portal, which requires a separate login.

Next, I'd like to see the tech discussion right under the RA. It's simply the technical side of what RA is supposed to be, except we do tend to see a slightly higher chance of Linden response there.

Content creation right under that.

And I have no idea why we have a feedback section anymore. We're told all the time to report bugs and feedback to the JIRA, so getting rid of that would encourage the use of the JIRA. (No, I don't agree, but that's the feeling I've gotten about the JIRA.)

Thanks for doing the poll, Cristalle!

The Blog Discussion section is a totally new thing ... the idea is to link each Blog entry that has comments directly to an automatically created thread in that subforum. This idea actually originated with the Lindens.

VOTE please quick and put in other comments on the structure please. Robin's office hours are in one hour, and we'll probably give her a preliminary version then.

I voted yes because it makes sense to draw attention to the fact that there are specialised forums for these type of questions.
The Blog discussion one is a very good idea, though could get messy.
Businesses-in-world is very vague to me, almost begs for advertising IMHO.
Support information would presumably contain links to where suppport can be found. Seems a bit redundant to me, given the link at the top of this page.
Known issues may be useful, no idea whether anyone ever uses though, I tend to scan the Jira if I come across weirdnessness.

Hope that helps

I don't think people who are prone to post in the wrong forum will take the effort to scroll down far enough to come across Resident Answers (or make the effort to actually read why there are so many different ones) so whichever forums end up near the top will get off-topic posts so it might as well be RA.

Makes no difference to me either way, but.....

If I'm not mistaken, Linden has changed the order of the forums multiple times, and it hasn't seemed to make a whole lot of difference

I don't think it will make that much difference either. Any other forum I've been in the mod is constantly having to move misposted threads. I guess it couldn't hurt though.

On my monitor there is unused space on both sides of the forum, unless I take special steps to make it otherwise.

A list of the forums should be in the left sidebar area. Links to the wiki, the knowledgebase, the the blog, the support, our accounts, etc. could go in the right sidebar area.

These should be fixed areas so that they are onscreen all the time we are using the forums.

Wow, SueC. Can vBulletin software do that, or would it be a huge cutomization job?

<- knows nada about BB software. In a wiki it would be easy.

NO... nononononononononono

why?

because every new person to a forum goes to the first forum, it's much better to have general at top, and redirect people if needed instead of flooding focused forums with general questions

Oh yeah? Then why isn't Resident Run Websites overrun?

I don't think so. Eyes stopped at the first seemingly relevant forum.

They're also right next to each other so it's hard to notice one without noticing the other.

If you swap "Content Creation" with "Resident Conversation" (assuming the Lindens won't give up "Linden Links" then it would take two full screen scrolls (on my puter) to even notice RA.

If they would get rid of "Linden Links" RA would still be a full screen scroll away.

I have no problem with it being a screen scroll away. But first time users will at least read past those forums to know they exist before hitting RA. And if the question is one of a technical nature, it stands a greater chance of getting into the right forum.

Well personally I think content creators and people looking for technical issues will happily navigate the forums. I don't see a reason to change them.

heyas;

i have to agree with void, et al.... keep those clueless people here. while we hide from them in the depths of the bottom of the page.... :X

no offense to clueless people.

Link to the various forums and other useful links should be visible all the time while using the forums, as depicted in this crude sample: