Have the ResMods gotten Cranky?

Yeah, but my country has Air Supremacy...

ok. You, Isablan. I love you. I love everyone, but right now I love you. I am sooooo stealing this and using it in my RL job over and over and over.

Can't we all just STFU and get along?

It seems to this non-participant that it will be well nigh impossible for Strife to lock this thread at any time. It is too much about him. If he leaves it open, he can be accused of basking in the praise, if he closes it he can be accused of slamming the door on criticism.

Perhaps the only way to end this is to take a vote and have the participants themselves decide when it should be locked. How about when ten of you say "lock it"?

That's my opinion.

I was hoping it would just slip off the front page since I posted things here that I now regret. All we need to do is stop posting here and it will go away. Starting now.

While it's descending, anyone who reads this can note that am very sorry to Malachi that I attacked him here for something completely unrelated to this thread.

Now I'm cranky. I tried out I am Legend last night. Saw Strife (who was a dog), and was just about to say hi when he killed me! I'd just found the submachine gun, too.

And how is this a surprise to you? Strife is probably laying in wait for all of us to go there.........

Well, his doggy speech did sound awfully like ... 'panties, panties, panties'.

If I'm reading this thread correctly, this seems to be the crux of the matter: should there be "official" LL forums, or what are the minimum conditions under which such forums could be acceptable?

It certainly seems to me that a company may reasonably advance its business interests by having a forum. Actually, more than that: I've publicly advocated the continuing existence of these forums, and their improvement to better serve both LL's goals and those of its customers (even including folks who post in these forums--even including use of the forums as an activity of value in and of itself).

Maybe that's all wrong, and I should be convinced that LL indeed shouldn't have forums. But of that I'm not yet convinced.

I certainly concede that LL seems unconvinced, itself, of the business value these forums could provide, and apparently incapable or unwilling to take advantage of that value. This is puzzling, but would not be the first opportunity that LL has missed. But that's kinda why they call it "opportunity cost" : whatever LL prioritizes is to the detriment of whatever it fails to prioritize.

For example, I think the official blog was a complete waste of resources which, had they been invested in the forums, would have produced a substantially more complete and coherent customer/user environment. But that's now a "sunk" opportunity cost (well, aside from the continuing operations cost of keeping the unfortunate blog afloat).

Looking forward, we can either continue to try to help LL appreciate the value of what they have in these forums--and then work for their improvement, or else lobby to have them shut down. Until convinced otherwise, I'm advocating the former course of action.

you could add that the very nature of this place serves to show it's value. Some of the most vociferous critics of LL are here. Most are premium members, many are island/land /business owners. Most besides me, are technically aware of the ins and outs of the program, are the top shelf in creators. Tey whine, bitch and moan incessantly, and are never satisfied. yet they stay, and invest in the product, when most casual users would have left long ago. Sure, some new people may be turned off by the negativity, but some, like me, will sift through it and learn things and may stay on, and my become one of those land/business owner/creator that SL needs in far greater numbers than it needs the likes of CBS or IBM. And they will one day bitch and moan here incessantly.

I think some people have aspirations of the heights the forums would climb to if there was a general forums with perfect moderation, etc.

I think they are basically dreaming. The forums would only be a little different than they are now.

Maybe we should all volunteer to go down there and let Strife kill us just once, to get out all his pent up anger and frustration.

Kinda like a dunking booth?

Summary: LL doesn't care about the forums or volunteers and therefore efforts to get LL to improve them are in vain.

And I don't disagree at all with this in principle.

If you look at the portion of my posts which aren't bitching about LL, you'll find that they are primarily directed toward helping others. I had been a Mentor and a Live Helper and prior to that I was an informal newb helper. Helping fellow players is something that I've always enjoyed. A forum for a product as complex and flaky as SL is incredibly valuable to LL and their customers; this is true of other firms too (e.g. Adobe) especially given the paucity of SL documentation. One need only look at the Texturing, Building, and Tech issues forums to see how valuable a responsive forum can be to the customer base.

So if I enjoy helping so much why did I drop out of those groups? Leaving Mentor was a no-brainer; at the time there was no way at all to stop group messages. If anyone in Mentor opened a group IM, you always got it - tagged or not - quickly followed by a couple dozen "Mentor Foo has left this session" messages. We'd asked for anything that could stem the flood of "junk chat", but LL didn't deem it worthwhile. So here we are volunteering our game time to LL for no compensation, and they couldn't be bothered to keep us from getting spammed during the times when we wanted to do our own work. I thought that ingracious.

I left Live Help some time after for another reason, the game had become terribly unstable and things like video had just been introduced which didn't work for the majority of people who tried to use it. Ultimately my responses were mostly reduced to apologies for LL ("yep, that seems to be broken and us player volunteers collectively have no idea how to help you at all nor have any prognosis for when or if it will be fixed". At that point, I got tired of apologizing for myriad things I had no control over.

Which brings me to why I object to LL controlled forums in practice. There is no doubt they are the "forum of record" in that knowing nothing else, you can come here for assistance and usually get it. If you are a paying customer, that is. I am baffled that LL can look at the state of their volunteer customer support and wonder why conversions to premium accounts are so low. This "try before you buy with no interactive assistance until you buy" is an abomination of marketing. Unfortunately for us, every bit of revenue that LL loses because of asinine product promotion means less funds they have to spend on equipment, staff, and paper clips.

So why do you need privileged status to ask a question of your fellow customers? I think the reason was with "open registration" the forums were subject to a large amount of griefing. Sadly, closing the forum access was akin to curing a head cold with a guillotine: effective, but a little excessive. They could have moderated more firmly and banned more rapidly, but they weren't interested in doing this. They could have given ResMods more power, but they don't even like giving lattitude to their own staff Liaisons let alone "community volunteers". They could have stopped open registration but they wanted that 10 million number so badly. It was a suite of poor policy decisions that caused forum troubles but I honestly think LL is unable or unwilling to see this.

So where are we now? Strife had gone to LL and asked for the ability to solicit interest for more resmods; not the ability to actually do anything about it, just to ask the question. And he did get many responses and LL has treated all these volunteers with the discourtesy of not even acknowledging them. Strife has been asked to give some status to the volunteers, even "I don't know what the status is" was requested; I don't know that Strife is even permitted to say that.

What do I conclude from all this? That LL is insensate to the needs of their customers and the desires of their volunteers and as such have left themselves in a position where the sad state of the potentially useful forums is in wild disarray. They've shown no inclination to improve the situation, either through granting Strife appointment privileges or any other mechanism. Indeed, the only action that LL has taken with repect to the forums over the last couple of years is to shut them down. Finally, the one resmod they do have can only lock threads and can't do anything more For example, someone yesterday posted a "Ann Avatar sucks" thread and is still posting today; I can't think of a better example of LL's disconcern with this valuable resource.

Any business that depends on a large, dispersed varied audience continuing to patronize it NEEDS continual customer feedback. Finest kind of market research. There are some signs LL does pay attention to these forums; I hope so, and I hope they feed and encourage the forums.

Now, it is true they may not WANT to. That is a different question. After all, as someone once said to a particularly wrong-headed individual we both knew, suicide is always an option.

So, I just wasted an hour and half bumping threads in order to try and nudge this one off the front page so it could die in peace.

Ah well.

I give up.

I was also hoping for this thread to drop off the radar - it hasn't.

Thus I should note that Raymond and I have exchanged mutual apologies and I think we both learned something in the process.

On a related note, it appears that forum mutes also block forum PMs which does make it a tad difficult for people to amicably resolve interpersonal disputes.

One could reasonably ask why it hadn't been locked in post #51. And then other people could rail against the proposition that it might have been.