Recommended Alternative SL Forums

And if your outlook on the future turns out to be correct I plan to be one or part of one of those corporations.

LOL.


Well. We do not need a bunch of people to come here and repeat the name of the forum we support over and over again.

The way i just did not.

lol

I don't think there's anything LL can do to get the millions of active accounts to support hundreds of thousands of concurrency without either staffing up to provide a permanent Linden presence in EVERY welcome area and help island, or not only bringing back the mentor's program full blast but also providing incentives to mentors. The first hour experience, in world, is appalling, and there's nothing they can do with the user interface or they've been doing with the kinds of policy changes they've been following, that will do anything about that first hour. It takes dedicated people to make newcomers find their way around and feel welcome.

And I certainly don't see removing functionality from the website (and, no, the new blog has less functionality than even this poor neglected software) will make them more of a credible "web 3d".

When it comes down to it, everyone will make up there own minds. Go look, see, read, say hi and find your own home. Arguing about it here is going to be counter productive to all the sites.

?? I'm really puzzled, Ann. Folks here are upset at losing many basic forum capabilities, such as top-level navigation. They are upset at losing continuity between whatever content forums the Flog has, and the considerable knowledge already embodied in the Scripting, Building and Texturing forums here. They are upset at losing the ability to search specific forums. They are concerned that long threads are implicitly discouraged because they are unreadable in that layout. I could go on, but I'm not sure you're interested.

I don't think anyone is concerned that the Flog will be moderated; in fact, I and others actively lobbied for a pJira requesting moderation of *these* forums.

I have seen your postings on the Flog, and I doubt you would take such an insulting tone in any venue where you thought Lindens were present. Best luck in your career ambitions. You never know who's watching.
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Made an alt recently and tried the process for becoming a resident? Add to that the SL09 viewer, assuming it really is a viewer that doesn't require a rocket scientist, and it becomes a lot easier to become an entry level resident. So the need for welcome area staff drops off. Increase resident participation in the help process and you further reduce the staff requirements for ramping up. Let me ask you something. Is there a need for a zillion staff to help people in EQII or WoW? no. There are, however, bots that help train users with basic skills and they work their way up because they want to be there and there is a points system.
I'm afraid I can't be all doom & gloom and assume LL is staffed by morons. it just isn't that way. However I will agree that LL is unlikely to pay heed to people hurling insults at them with no useful feedback. So if that is called not listening I don't blame them. On the other hand you and I both know LL does listen in the ways they choose to listen. And it is quite obvious to me that LL has recognized the possibility of competition and is no longer laying their plans out for others to use against them. I wish I could know more about what is to come but I am not an LL exec and therefore I have no need to know at this time.

Yes, as it happens, within the last six months. I occasionally create a new alt purely for the purpose of providing help to newbies. There's been a number of changes made since 2005, but the process still remains pretty much the same: you materialize in a place with a bunch of other newbie avatars, with no trained or even educated help present, and are expected to learn how to handle Second Life and the social norms of the SL environment by some kind of magic osmosis. People coming in don't even realize, a lot of the time, that they're not in SL proper yet. They don't understand how to get a landmark to get out of there from the exit kiosk. They complain how small and boring it is, and log out, never to return.

Once they get to a welcome area with its gesture griefers and prim freenises, a bunch more decide SL isn't for them. They need people there, permanently, just to moderate the conversation and enforce the rules.

A better client won't fix "help island" or keep the welcome area posses from freaking newbies out.

But they are not doing that. They cut back the mentor's program, and the don't give mentors the ability to eject bad apples from the welcome areas.

They're not virtual worlds, they're just big combat games.

They don't seem to listen to people politely providing good advice either.

It's been over a year since I started SL, and I have no alts, so only the one experience to rely upon. But when I started, I was struck initially by the following things:

1) How very very very dull and dreary and, at the same time, inadequate, the initial tutorials were. Do these even exist anymore?

2) The two mentors at the Welcome Island at which I arrived were in voice, one male and one female. And both were a hell of a lot more interested in trading pretty spicy sexual innuendo with each other than they were in actually helping the noobs.

3) Someone who was (I have always assumed, but didn't know enough at the time to check) not a mentor was watching the whole scene from a distance, out of sight. He IMed me while I was trying to get answers to a few questions, and gave me far more effective and useful advice than either of the "official" mentors. He also tried very very hard to pick me up. Because he knew I was interested in music, he offered to show me his in-world music collection (much better than offering to show me his "engravings," eh?). I had a pretty clear idea what was happening, but went along anyway: he TPed me to his house, gave me a tour, and then proceeded, through some only mildly subtle references to his sex bed, and his even kinkier skybox, to try to get me to have sex with him. I made my excuses and left.

NOT the best "New User Experience" imaginable. I hope to God that LL is trying harder now.

Been there, done that, handed out the t-shirts. Not as much fun as I expected.

I've made no secret of my disappointment in the current state of the New Forums, but I've also withheld judgment on whether they'll be made fit-for-purpose before these forums are closed. Too soon to tell, really; one hopes the website migration team hears the agonized wails of the poor XstreetSL refugees.

It's got nothing to do with scaling to a million concurrency, by the way. If this application of Jive/Clearspace succeeds, even at current forums hit rates, secondlife.com will be an order of magnitude busier than its most active current forums installation. And we all remember the (much simpler) blogs falling to their knees under the load of a single blog post about Adult Content; misconfiguration, or scale ceiling? The Jive developers must be praying to the jquery gods that there's not a brick wall bottleneck on the horizon.

Of course that won't be a problem if nobody uses it, and nobody is going to use it if it doesn't get usable. Yes, there are cool features, but they're *really* hidden now--it's not just lack of familiarity: they're hidden. Instead we get control surface permanently consumed by features nobody will ever use--"View as PDF," for example.

And there are serious defects in the basics: what the hell did Jive choose for their text edit box? These don't have to be implemented from scratch any more, but I sure don't recognize the mess that they're using. At least half of my attempts to post end up eaten by that kludge, and most often I give up rather than retype everything into a blank edit box.

So yeah: people are bitching about it. I'm bitching about it, and I'm one who's trying to hold out hope for it. It has a very long way to go.

the new forums are called 'jive'?
ahahahahahahahahaha

considering prok is banned from slu i imagine you do have fun trash-talking the banned.
at secondcitizen prok can address comments made about him. thats the biggest difference between slu and sc.

Have you tried helping new arrivals?

I spend a portion of my time helping and sometimes it is amazingly difficult. Once I spent a literal half hour trying to teach a girl how to drag a box out of inventory down to the ground. She really wanted to learn and wanted my help, but she could not get it.

Of course, it's possible that I'm not as good a teacher as I imagine, but there is a learning curve that is almost straight up for some people, and those people need quite a bit of hand-holding.

I feel pretty sure that the neglect of new arrivals, and the inadequacy of the new Forums are due to two things: (1) LL's conviction that we are able to take care of ourselves, and (2) their desire to appeal to, and to cater almost exclusively to, corporations. This is why the new Forums are so ugly and plain. This is why the threads must be short and exclusively SL-related.

It may be that these current forums got hijacked by people who used it to create a community, and that's why there's so many off-topic posts, and threads that are just silly. Friendships and connections are NOT built on the exchange of strictly technical information.

In my opinion, the fact that LL's new "forum" format is repugnant to many of us is exactly because it not designed for us. It's made for future corporate clients.

And I hope it works for them. I really do. I hope that companies do come and put money in, and push LL to make needed improvements.

LL isn't fumbling in the darkness: This move is exactly what they mean to do and want to do. They are right: we can take care of ourselves, and we will. It's entirely appropriate that this move will encourage the development of alternative forums and foster their growth.

.

He's a polarizing figure. It's impossible to mention his name and keep things neutral.

I've seen some of your posts that have nothing to do with him and was surprised to find that I agreed with you and liked what you wrote.

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My point, which everyone seems to have missed, was that the trashing (of more than one person) is happenning on SC, not on SLU, for the simple reason that people on SC don't get banned for it.

Word
This
and QFT

I went to the new SL blogs (or whatever they are) last night. (note, when you are on the SL website, and click 'Forums', it still brings you here, not there.) I did my profile, looked around some, looked at 'Discussions'. I thought, 'These are 'discussions'?' Barely 2 or 3 posts in a thread, does not a discussion make.............But I do totally agree with everything Seven said, ask a question, get an answer, period, nothing to chat about.

That doesn't mean they're not fumbling around in the darkness. I'm reminded of something from a novel of Terry Pratchett's, about a character named Susan Sto Helit. It goes something like this. "Susan was practical. This was a character flaw, she knew. It didn't make her happy, or contented, or (and this was the most unfair part) necessarily even *right*, but it DID make her *definite*, and right now she was definite that what she was seeing wasn't real."

Linden Labs is definite. They are not necessarily right.

If you want to use volunteers on a message board as unpaid tech support, you have to have knowledgeable and motivated people reading it and answering questions. You don't get knowledgeable and motivated people by giving them points, you get them by giving them a community.

Having the knowledgeable and motivated people moving to other forums doesn't serve Linden Labs' goals. Doing things that don't serve their goals is a sure sign that they're fumbling around in the darkness.

FWIW, I have not written off the new flogs as my future home.

I will continue to lurk the others no matter where I go.

Excellent point. SL needs a strong forum community to help build connections among users and give people way to reach out to others for answers and support. I can't understand why LL doesn't realize this.

/me grins
There is only one lab
And I know you know that. I just wanted to tease you a little. maybe lighten the mood.

The problem for me is that when I do this I already know the answers so I just zip past everything and end up with my alt standing in the skybox of my main within minutes.

Even reading the boards - they make sense to me because I already know the info they contain.

Its very hard to remember what it was like back in 2006. It was so horrid for me that I can remember that - but the memory is mostly about lag in a world of gray boxes...


Would it help if I gave the correct answer of yes?

Both of these games have very large community management teams - people that are in-game 24/7 to assist with issues, deal with greifers, and so on. You won't see them, unless you petition for one, but they are there.

Log into one of those games some time, get yourself into a situation needing assistance, and file a petition. After a while you'll start feeling like those guys are stalking you - they're just too quick to respond and they don't like to say bye once they're on you.

I think someone needs to make a canine avatar or pet and call it a "Linden Labrador".

Wha??????

The new Q&A (prefer that term over forum)...is not so bad. A few tweaks, and it will be fine. There are plenty of discussions going on there even this early in the game....and plenty of good info being tossed about. Once you figure out how to get to all the different discussion locations (don't ask me how - I have to wing it for now) - - you will find more than enough to keep you busy.

If you're the type that just wants to discuss a concept, or simply read and learn about one, or ask a question....it will work just fine. You don't have to wade through a bunch of off-topic chit-chats, and /me waves, and giggles and me toos....and some people prefer that.

Now, there is something for everyone. Almost. Not sure where the scripters and builders will go.....I didn't see discussion for that over there.

But must say that it is very refreshing to drop into a place where "information" is the basis for discussion.....and not chit chat unrelated to the topic....and personality conflicts (maybe a few - but looks like you're going to have to limit those). If you get off on chit chat and personality conflicts....there are plenty of places to go....plenty of different styles....no one should be complaining. (except for the scripters and builders).

Settle in somewhere, or take a breather for a few weeks.....or heaven forbid, drop back inworld.....stuff going on there!