Moderator? Well..you tell me!

I really shouldnt DO this..and I'm sure I'll regret it,(when im sober), but theres no moderator..and i feel like a little kid on their first day home alone with NO PARENTS! wooo..ok..really...for real..tell me whats the difference without a moderator. They lock topics that I wish they WOULDNT..and DONT lock the ones that I think they should..so just tell me!..me ducks behind the chair!

If there were truly no content restrictions, to moderation at all, the guys that do the ninja turtles - goatse porn displays inworld could supply some payment info and fill the forums with similar material.

But, that's so far fetched, it's almost like thinking man will walk on the moon!

I'm seeing it's made some people who were previously argumentative more focussed and less stroppy.

It's made some people even more spammy and boring.

And also there's a lot less fun flouting authority if it is not there, one assumes.

Even some adults need supervision at times.

In the absence of any controls on posts contents, everyone can advertise their products and services in every forum, and everyone can crosspost their advertisements into every forum.
Those wishing to ask for scripting help can post the question into every forum, since that increases the chance of someone seeing it.

What happens in the current system of "access restricted to payment verified info" but not much moderation so far as such things as enforcing the Resident Answers forum description or the forum sticky created by Torley Linden is that a person posts a support question, and it is pushed way down on the list by the many posts in other threads with content like "me too" or "bite me". Folks looking at the forum sorted by order of most recent post are likely to not look through enough pages to find these pushed way back thread. This makes the forums much less useful as a place to request help with Second Life. As it becomes harder to find posts with questions about how to use Second Life, the folks that come to the forum to answer such question find it less rewarding and find something else to do with their time. People that use the forum search to look up information find more and more useless posts in the results list, and thus will be more likely to not look up answers to their own questions, resulting in more posts of questions, and people will be less likely to bother looking up the answers to those questions, causing more questions to go answered.

With zero moderation, there would be no enforcement of the Big Six of the Community Standards, so we would be likely to have many posts filled with religious, nationalist, sexual orientation, and other forms of collectivist hate speech, both by actual bigots and by those who just love to stir up trouble and hatred and misery in forums.

With no moderation, no enforcement of any rules about what people say here, people would create false stories of competitor's misdeeds.

The requirement that one have payment info on file if you created your account after August of 2006 is a great deal of "moderation" in and of itself. The fear that one will get their account closed in they misbehave beyond a certain point causes folk to restrict the content of their posts to a great degree.

The biggest problem I see with an unmoderated forum is that, sooner or later, it will be closed. One can speculate about cause-and-effect there, but that's the inevitable result.

I'm with SueC and Qie. Without moderation the forums would be closed.

Before that happens, we would ... eventually ... see some rather ugly things. It would not get to the point of p0rn being spattered everywhere, though -- it would be closed to new posts before that.

But, theoretically, without moderation there is no reason why that wouldn't be able to happen.

Currently, however, the forums are not utterly without moderation. If p0rn were to show up here, I'm sure Aki would step in.

Being still somewhat new to the ways of the Internets, I can naively think that we could do the job of self moderation being adults, but being well versed in Reality and Human nature, I know the opposite is true. What I would like to see is fair, consistent, transparetnt moderation,and there has to be a place for some Off Topic and General Human Contact, or else the sense of Community will be destroyed. A strictly technical/game question forum would be valuable, but how many of us would come to one as much as we do now? I wouldn't. I rarely have those types of questions. I might check in once a day, but that would be it.I still say that this Forum as a knowledge center and and out of world meeting place is too valuable for The Lindens to lose.

Why is this "sense of community" unable to exist at a resident operated site?

A content creation system like CorelDraw can operate support forums for users to help users solve problems with the software without any need to have one to promote a sense of being part of a "CorelDraw" community.

Because a support site for a Software application is just that. All the people there are using that product for far flung reasons, they really aren't interested in making friends. SL being a Social Platform to begin with, and being so full of wonders and pitfalls, people like to share what they have learned using it with each other. We all can meet in world due to many reasons, some people here have never met inworld but have formed strong connections.

Most of my inworld friends are because of this forum. I think it's a good place for potential residents to get an insight into SL. Not everyone is a Virtual Reality Junkie, and keeps up on all the developments out there, some of us come out of the basement very once in a while. I stumbled across SL purely by accident. I stayed, took the Premium Plunge early, but I think having at least sme of the Forum open to Anybody to read is a big plus. A person on the fence may see what fun people are having by reading about a group event or such and say "Hey, that sounds like something I'd Like to try". I know a lot of Old Timers don't like us Common Folk here, but it's obvious The Providers want our Quatloos, this is one way to help get them. Adding a small amount of Community Bonding will not hurt this Forum or SL at all, but taking it away will. Just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Resident run sites tend to be little more than personality cults. Despite some claims to the contrary, we are all on pretty much a level playing field here. Yes, some of us are more vocal, some have thicker skins, stronger personalities, but we are all equal. I have yet to see that on any private forum. That is one reason why we don't need Resmods, but moderation from LL.

This soon might be the end of the forums as we know it. Then replaced with a blog like structure.

I do agree with this, no one person whom we may banter, debate, disagree or laugh with is "in charge" of us here, we all have to or should be following the same rules.

Right now it really ain't that bad but the fact that the witty folks usually guide the convo here has been because the Moderation squashes the self-esteem right out of a Troll in short-order... at the risk (okay no "risk" just doing it) of sounding corny the Forums could become OVERRUN by idiots...um...fools...for lack of a better word. Quit lookin at my username and pay attention! I mean REAL "fools"


Ya know "SL Forums INVASION" stylee mon. 100% rude and uncut for the masses tell me how we handle that brrrappa

LL already pulled it's presence from here and took it to a blog. Killing these forums will only hurt them.

Do you really believe they let this muckery continue? They have showed us they don`t care in the game and in the forums and blogs. Its so noicable that they pull the forums down as well. They been saying this for a very long time.

Please prepare for a momentary thread derailment....

"Yummy Freelunch". Best. Name. Evah.


Thank you. You may now proceed with original discussion.

This forum goes i wont be posting anywhere. I agree with this and chris and I rarely agree. Although i"m not posting much right now i do read forums and to be honest this is the forum I read because of the fact that there is very little descrimination and the playing field is equal. I can't be bothered trying to "fit in" and about peer pressure or any other such thing. From what I have seen third party forums are not in fact run well and are always slanted towards one clique or another. There are no cliques here. I hate cliques and dont want to be part of them. I dont consider them to be friends those who are part of cliques they are just busy all the time trying to remain in the clique and not violate some unwritten rule. I just can't be bothered. Like me or hate me and base your friendship on that. Listen to what i say and agree or disagree and leave it at that. I dont like mobs and most third party forums have their version of a mob where you have to go through some sort of initiation and if the mob likes you your in but cross the mob and your out, question the mob and it becomes a pile on even if they agree with your they still pile on because that is what mobs do.

I have yet to see anything different in a third party site and I doubt i ever will. I hate them and always have. If there is no official board then I simply dont bother.

What muckery? I have yet to see any flaming or trolling aside from Jumpy. Sure there are more discussion threads now than in the past, but this is a good thing.

I find it impossibly ironic that someone who has often been accused of outright trolling and is reportedly on dozens of ignore lists is complaining about muckery

I wish I had your optimism but I don't believe this for a second. If you ask around in world you'll find that most people don't know the forums even exist. Why? Because LL doesn't promote it in any way. Oh, sure there's nice little links from the main pages but that's it. These forums are more useful and informative than the Knowledge Base, the Solution Finder, and the Wiki combined but LL either doesn't believe it or chooses to ignore it.

I meet them too. And every one we tell about the forum is a potential forum reader. Every wanderer who comes into the Hangout, and there are several each asks what the place is about, and they are told about the Forum. Even if they come and look and never post, it is a plus. I went into a club one night, the club owner recogized my name, made an embarrasinglty public announcement, and several people told me they are regular readers of the RA section, though they never post. A couple of people I know became RA readers based on my mention of it to them, in regards to the Cartel.

/me chuckles, thanks solanghe, BUT, Id like to ask, if forums are going to continue being unmoderated? If so, and LL doesnt care about them anymore, then what will happen to SL itself? Is this just the first in a series of, letting us know we just arent important anymore, or they are just tired of running a game and a forums site. I dont know..I feel neglected for some reason. Is it just me and Im having some horrible childhood flashback..lol

These forums, and in particular this one, provide the kind of user feedback that many RL consumer-oriented business would kill for. And the rest will go out of business because they don't know what's good for them.

Anybody else notice how much LL has talked about Aristotle/Integrity or age-verification in general since one poster here "age-verified" her six-year-old via Integrity, and another verified a completely fictitious individual that existed only in a Facebook entry? Not at all, as far as I have seen.

There may be idiots here, but they get laughed off the stage pretty quickly, and there are a lot of very bright, very knowledgeable people posting here, including IT professionals I suspect would be too high-priced in the job market for Philip to afford - and LL gets their feedback FREE.

Of course, the Lindens do have to be smart enough to factor that into their cost-benefit analysis...