XstreetSL support and forum changes

Or perhaps they will find that tasks that did seem lower priority than posting and reading comments now seem to have become more important.

When web sites fail, such as the blogs.secondlife.com producing error messages when you try to post a reply, or crashing the browser, does the web server that houses the page get a "crash report" of any kind?

Yes but they go to the automatic sorting machine first.

OK, this is totally irrelevant, but I was all LOLWUT??? when I saw this story about Jive Software's erstwhile VP Marketing's new startup:

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2009/07/bbr.html

Really gives ya a warm fuzzy about the blog's software, don't it?

I have no idea, but I know that when the website fails, you generally can't get to support for LL... Sucks to have purely web-based support. And umm.. Damien1 is right.

When i go to the website I get this error:

502 Bad Gateway
nginx/0.6.34

They may as well just shut it all off and replace the forums with a plain web page that says : "Did you really think we wanted to listen to you? Go away."

The "Second Life Answers" area in the blogs and the "Discussions" they have tried to host there so far are almost 100% unusable, especially for anything that gets more than a handful of responses saying "Woot! Great blog, dude!"

Try following the thread of conversation in a discussion over there with more than 100 posts in it. It's IMPOSSIBLE to keep track of who is replying to whom, or what new comments have been added, withot re-reading EVERY POST each time you check the topic.

Try finding ANYTHING that has slipped off the first page or so of any section. Just try...

As I have repeatedly said, NO BLOG IS A GOOD SUBSTITUTE FOR A GOOD FORUM BBS.

Blogs are designed for "one to many" or "few to many" communications, where a handful of feedback responses is all one might expect. It's fine for "Blondin's Blog on Great Donut Shops in San Francisco"... It's crap as a user support and community forum.

Blog software fails miserably for many-to many communications. It fails completely for long-winded discussions or technical Q&A sites, where a LOT of content is posted by a LOT of users, and gets a LOT of responses.

===

Also, "Instead of contacting Support on the Xstreet SL site or by email, all your Xstreet SL support needs will be available via your Second Life Support Portal - http://secondlife.com/support. We are looking forward to streamlining and improving your Support process."

Does that mean that only Premium Members will now be able to get support for XStreet-SL issues?

Er is it just me or does his gf look like Michael Jackson?

This is probably because nobody could figure out how to get persistent cookied logins working again. Kinda like how they couldn't figure out how to keep vBulletin updated and safe from sql attacks here.

Oops it's broken, time to buy a new toy that'll be fun to play with until we realize we can't get that running right either.

There's a video with her in it at http://sexwillhappen.com/what-is-sex-positive.

What concerns me more about this isn't so much the loss of the forums, it's the loss of support. It means that only Premium account holders will be able to raise a support ticket about XStreet issues.

What worries me most is not just that it sucks, but that they've done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about any of the problems--including the ones that prevent people from even accessing the damned thing. Even the obvious, simple crap that's been known since before the thing went into beta: how hard could it possibly be to just turn on avatars for non-Lindens, for example?

By now they must realize that they just aren't equipped to make that software work, and yet they're throwing more stuff onto it. It's quite completely insane.

Maybe at some point in the near future LL will start charging fees for support for NPIOF accounts for all things SL and this is part of the eventual changes.

Just my thoughts though

Am I the only one who's had a laugh over the fact that the blog post didn't make it to the featured blogs list (where all new ones usually go) and is effectively hidden from sight and to add to it the comments have been turned off.

Even they realise that this is not what could be called a popular move. lol

Colossus did say very early in the takeover that the ticket system would be open to everyone - not just premiums. However since we've seen just how credible LL are with the statements they make that probably does mean the exact opposite.

Colossus also made a comment months ago about how they're looking at bringing in tag advertising rates. So if you advertise on xsl you can look forward to be gouged for a sub standard product yet again.

Unfortunately he's removed the comment from the previous post urging us to make freebies for the newbies but I'll remind you all again that this is our role in SL - to make free stuff for LLs new wallets to the slaughter and to pay LL for the privilege.

Happy, shining faces now...

Yep its all about money and nothing else and now staff from Xstreet have gone to the dark side what would you expect as they have all been through the Stepford Wife process and are all LL clones now Its a shame that the customers that go to work for LL soon seem to lose the memory of what SL was for them and then treat the customers with the normal LL contempt. Ah well sign ups with us are up x9 on previous days to date and we still have another 9hrs left on the 24hr day so thanks Xstreet

I think you'll find that all the old SLX staff have gone - period. I suspect only Apotheus is left now and he'll probably be gone once the porting of the site to secondlife.com is done.

Sami went before the sale and Tigress and Selene (?) were sacked a couple of months back. I think there was only a programmer and a couple of others beside them and I've seen nothing of them for ages.

I recommend that they all be fired sooner if they are still around! Specially the leader of that corrupt bunch of weasels. Their Money was made and now they are nothing but Poison to the system costing LL more than they earn.

as to the forums there, that is one big Psycho Drama Fest, most of which has nothing to do with the product being offered for sale there. The only people that were able to speak the truth and not get banned from there are Friends and Family and the biggest brown nose suck-ups in all of the Virtual World Universe.. oh and the morons who payed them big money for their overpriced listing features.

Short of the product announcements and the technical section that forum has no purpose.


I am glad that they will close that forum. The fun part will be that all the psychos are going to be unleashing their crap on this or the future version of this forum.

It still drives my CPU to 100% every time I go to the blogs. Formatting is just total crap. Nothing seems to work.

Have they fixed ANY of the problems that have been torturing visitors since day 1 of this?

I seem to remember reading you were banned from them didn't I?

Sometimes I think their bannings appeared to be a little heavy handed but I don't know the full details so I can't really say if they were deserved or not and before you start this is not the place to air your grievance about how unfair the banning was.

I do know that down the years I've opened my mouth and given them many opportunities to send me on a holiday and they've never done it. I've had threads locked and public finger wagging but that's about it and I've been just as critical of them as I am of everything else.



That's my biggest fear too. It's interesting that a lot of the poisonous attention seekers don't venture outside XSL. I'm hoping it stays that way.

That does not meet the goals of the program.

/me sighs. That would be funnier if it was not true.

But look how shiny "Second Life Answers" is. Just pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Yes, i suspect their website coding at XStreet is less than optimal. I remember when we lobbied for the ignore feature there, they stated they couldn't add it to phpBB because the forum code was so heavily tied to the actual commerce site! Sounds like a pile of dominoes and they are afraid to accidentally tip over one.

Been expecting this merge for awhile, I simply hope this new 'forum' isn't some lame, home-grown solution. It better be full featured forums.

Er.. I meant the new blogware they're using.

/me has no problems with these forums or the slex forums. They actually work, tho these forums here are a bit hobbled. The blog stuff pisses me off every single time I go there.

Haha.. no not banned just restricted access - they banned me from the furums and then sent me an email telling me that it was done as a result of a customer service Data Entry Error, but they still could not restore my access. I was actually just about to raise holy hell about that, but if they are closing that thing, it will save me the time.

As to the drama engines.. they would get eaten alive or squashed like a bug on here. The overall level if intelligence seems to be much higher here than on their current playground and nobody would buy into their tactics. I too noticed that most of the biggest troublemakers there stay clear of this place, probably for that very reason.

They're not coming here. They're going to the blog.