Forum Facelift

Mari, I agree that there would have to be rules - no naming names, in a bad way

I second this.



Ha! I had an ex with that name


Some have mentioned that it shouldn't be LL's responsibility to host an off-topic, or GD forum. Afterall, they already have their plate full taking care of customers inworld.

How about issuing tickets to those who violate the Community Standards on the GD forum. The amount of $L would depend on the severity. Any and all $L gathered would go to the the tech dept that is presently working on making the grid stable.

So if things get a little heated and someone calls another poster 'Idiot' or (fill in the blank %@#%&*!), they will have to pay, say $L1000 for each nasty or condescending remark. Racist/Sexist remark ? $L2500, please.

Although I'm sure some will gladly pay to have 'the last word', it will limit them. They wouldn't be let back on the GD part of the forum until they paid. Sort of like a swear jar.

If 'rich' people abuse the system, who knows, by the end of the year we may be able to hire an extra tech employee...

Lol, I love this idea I can imagine a lot of people trying to provoke those responses though, just with "innocent" comments from other forum fights.

Your name is "Pinky?"



Also a good idea. The blog comments are, well... at the least, difficult to read.

Mari

re: blog comments. I believe this is what they mean by blog integration. It would also remove the eternal grousing by Bitter Betties from the front page.

I personally don't want to join a 3rd party chat, social site.
I have hard enough trying to contain all the information, passwords,etc
I already have in my head I can't deal with more.
I like the forums, I wish though they were sometimes easier to find key information I am looking for.
Sometimes there are things that come up in world I have questions or want feed back about.
Forums are sort of safe way for me to interact with many people, get information, sometimes make connections that I wouldn't have access to in world.
Also as creator, who is also struggling with rl health issues, when I am in world my focus is learning, creating or hanging out with few friends I have made.
I don't have the energy nor the time to deal with getting information, going to clubs,etc but when go to forums I get to hear about different things that I have missed or that are happening in world.
For some people like myself SL can be very overwhelming place to create, learn and exist in, sometimes its nice to go to forums where things are very 2D and you're not be swarmed with many conversations going on at all one time, nor lag.
If we all got the every member in forum who chats regular in world alll together to discuss whatever, it would be very full of lag and hard to
concentrate on.
Perhaps its just me. I like SL a whole lot but I am not able to multi-task
conversations, creating and interacting like I did in my 30s any more.
I bet there are others who value the forums for this reason.
My suggestions are:
1)Don't push off social/communicating to 3rd party sites please.
2)Improve how people of all types of abilities, even those of us with handicaps
and disabilities can get information, know what is available in Second Life
in world, more information on how to do things within Second Life.
3)Give residents who pay to be here ways of dialogs about how to improve and enjoy Second life.
4) Provide ways for people to get more information about ways to connecting with new creative and recreational ideas, information and community within SL here on forums that may not know about those things.
Realize there so much out there in Second Life that people even if they have been around for long, long time may never know about that majority will never
see in advertisement or classified that unless someone shares here or online about through you guys, most often few will now about it.
5)Misuse of Forum, Trolls, Grievers, If they are be nasty here most likely
they are people you need to do something about because most likely
they are causing problems in world where you can't see them.
If they are making things miserable in forums for people here most likely they are doing this else where too.
People tend to be creature of habits regardless it's for the greater good or
bad.
This effects the quality of life for all residents whether or not they report it,
or the Lindens see this.
Just because you the "Lindens" can't see it doesn't mean its not happening and creating negative world for some of the residents who reside in world.
6) Scam and Consumer safety information....it's happening lets address, educate residence to be safe, enjoy there stay without being scammed.

Well said, FD.

Stephen, you gave some interesting ideas, but don't accuse me of being on the attack just because I disagree with you. So here goes...



Would be open to abuse just like every resident rating system has so far.



Some of the most helpful people on the boards have high post counts. Capping them would be a big disservice to RA.

I really can't imagine anyone posting for the sake of getting their post count up. I'm sure there are, but they must be few and far between, and very sad individuals.

As someone else said, I didn't realize I passed the 3,000 mark until long after someone pointed it out. I find the number of posts interesting, but not significant.



I saw no personal attacks in your post, just your opinions. Never apologize for your opinions.

I'm mixed on that one. I think it would allow people to vent more, which would be nice, and not feel they are hampered by a 100 post cap or whatever.

On the other-hand, seeing some of the whiny posts in the blogs I'm frightened at having some of them start posting regularly in the forums. That's my own selfishness though, and with good moderation it would keep their bitching in the proper forums.

Overall, it would probably introduce many new people to the forums, which would be a good thing.

First of all, a hearty 'Shorah!' to Robin, Kat, Travis, Desmond, Strife, and the others who know me from as far back as mid/late 2004 and have still stuck it out here.

I am shocked to discover that it's been horribly long since I was last here; My old sig mentioned that Myst Online was in Beta stage (~ 16 months later and now its shutdown will be in about a week ). Perhaps its more telling that my interest here fell out shortly after my term as RezMod - something that even today I've never talked much about, here or on my site (other than getting more cynical than I was before ). The only reason I'm here now is a passing reference to the forums under the LL weblog RSS feed (which is displayed on a sidebar at my site).

However, feedback is being solicited for something that was once very dear to my heart in SL (especially as someone who works late at night). So here goes, warts and all:

-> An update of the software is very long overdue, and allowing more general features (including BBcode or similar) would be a good idea. If you're going to stay with paid software though, it might be worth it to give Invision a look - they have interesting features that could be useful here (which I'll touch on shortly). It is used for many in the Myst/Uru community sites, in particular since they integrate so well with outside sources. Then again, a quick look at the Notebook Forums (running vB 3.6.5) looks more like a portal than a forum, so perhaps you can stick with that after all.

It is EXTREMELY important to have someone keep general maintenance of the forum software itself - primarily to keep up-to-date on possible exploits and test as needed before making the appropriate changes. This is *not* a full-time endeavor (I just did two major Wordpress site upgrades - one from scratch - in about 5 hours over two nights). However, I have many a horror story of varying public forums being brought down or otherwise corrupted by someone with a malicious agenda. In this case its a matter of When, not If (putting on my UNIX Admin hat briefly).

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-> Enable read/write access to the forums in a more 'tiered' manner (I believe its called Access Groups or something similar - I don't run a forum); This is to give the 'best foot forward' to the world while also allowing some flexibility for the individual. To expand further:

--> Guests (and therefore Search Spiders) should be able to read (at minimum) the Content, Conversation, and Technical Issues sections. Probably also International. These sections may need to have certain subsections hidden to Guests, depending on general usage.

--> Verified members should see the whole forum, and be able to post.

--> Premium/paying members should have the ability to 'Mute' or 'Ignore' whole sections (like General, if it gets brought back). This gives a tangible value to Premium again (many forum-based portals allow extra perks for paying them, you'd not be alone in this).

It would also allow easy view of the 'high-end' members like reps from IBM et al or the Concierge members (perhaps groups and hidden forums for them too?). Alternatively, allow a one-time fee of L$1000 or so for this access (thereby generating a small sink). See the forums on Priuschat.com for an example of the paid system - paying and 'Sponsor' members are clearly marked and show their pay level next to posts.

--> TG members should be able to use the same forum; However they'll have their own, greatly reduced list of subfora (which are NOT seen by MG members) and special 'approve everything' forums from MG side (in particular the Scripting Archive) should be available to them for reading only. 'Graduating' to MG from the forum side is as simple as changing their group membership, and should be easily automated (and this also allows them to contribute to the benefit of their earlier peers indirectly).

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-> Don't bother with Ratings of any sort in-forum; They got gamed in SL and they'll get gamed here, in either direction. In fact, replace direct post counts with text or graphical representations (as most sites have done).

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Regarding General/Rants & Moderation (these two kinda go hand-in-hand):

I, like others here, believe that a General-style forum (more accurately termed 'Off-Topic' or 'Off-World' or 'First Life') is required to draw the venting off to where it belongs - other than the Technical Discussions anyway. However, balancing that with moderation abilities is definitely going to be a challenge (Cybin did his best work there I think, and I never wanted any part of it within the first week).

I'm not yet prepared to add further comments to this portion; Maybe later tonight. However I do think outside moderation will work, if done with forethought (an excellent example of this - despite the occasional drama - occurred on the Myst Online forum of all places).

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Yipes, I've been writing for well over an hour now and this is getting into a Gwyneth-sized post. As I said, this is something that was dear to me in SL even before the ResMod project, since it was great to be helping people - or generally chat - when I could not get online.

/salute
--Tim Kimball

[Yes, that's my real name I'm signing to here. Everyone else knows me online as that name, why not y'all? Besides, I still consider myself a retired resident, despite poking my head in from time to time.]

[Second Note - I am cross-posting to my weblog for the sake of the Myst/Uru community (I am part of the MystBlogs aggregate site) and will forward comments as well if anyone has any.]

I'm a relative noob, but still, thanks for stopping by! *waves*
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Of course the devil is in the details, and the details here are devilish indeed. But I wouldn't necessarily dismiss this completely (my apparently offending post-count notwithstanding).

Imagine that reliable ratings were somehow magically available, and the perfect formula for ratings-to-daily-post-limit were known. What would be the wins?

Would I think harder before pressing the "Submit" button, knowing it would spend one of my precious allotted posts? Maybe. So maybe posts would be more helpful, better researched and more carefully thought-out.

Would it reduce rancorous, non-productive posts? If I knew I might run out of posts for replying to replies to my replies, I might temper the vitriol. And the ratings would presumably make that more of a concern for posters who might benefit more from being more concerned.

(Thinking of a possible "general amnesty," maybe a cap on word count is needed, too, or some other handicapping for typing speed. )

I have absolutely no idea how one would go about getting ratings that were valid enough to trust as input to something like this, but aside from that, the concept may have merit.

Isa, that's not I was getting at all. Come on now. If that's what you took away from my post you totally misunderstood my point. I never suggested that LL should just roll with it...etc. That was harsh.

Also, the only place I mentioned "fun" was here, at the very end of my post:



According to your post you have a great deal of experience in forum admin/culture. You know that mingled in along with the obnoxious folk - usually a minority - there are many people who post thoughtfully and politely. So a majority should suffer the loss of a enjoyable experience because of a few?

I really don't understand the pessimism about giving the GD another shot. It isn't written in stone that what went on in 2006 will happen again or as badly.

/me shrugs

While I've been one of those calling for more seriousness in RA, I also would love to see the forums be more fun overall. Bring on the smilies and such! Anythings better than what we've been experiencing the last week or so.

Oh, one more ting dat kinda bugs me. The list of moderators at the bottom of the page, at least on Resident Answers. It's way out of date, startign with listing Chadrick Linden as a moderator. He's not even a Linden no more, an hasn't been for months an months.

Mari

Nikka -> You have nine times the post count for the same approximate timeframe as me (around 14 months); I'd say you've quite enough experience to help!

Personally, when in 'mod' mode I posted an order of magnitude *less* than normal - In fact, most of my posts during that time (Feb 2006 I think) were in defending the freakin' project! One mod for a forum I've had many ups and downs with - The Guild of Writers (formerly the Age Builders) - almost never posts at all; He's effectively a full-time mod, spending the time there as needed and occasionally popping in on a thread to join into the discussion.


Qie -> I'm extremely skeptical about the suggestion to limit posts in order to deter trolling. I've had enough experience in high-traffic forums to know that a single, well-crafted post is all it takes to blow things out of the water (in particular when you combine that with a well-connected community who loves to speculate - something y'all have in common with the Myst/Uru community).


Solanghe -> Though I've not posted here in nearly a year and a half, I did stick my nose in at times to check on the state of things. Personally, I've only seen the names change - the amount of drama has stayed the same, its only moved.


--TSK
[I will post part 2 of my main commentary tomorrow.]

I dunno Alan, maybe you're right. I just know that compared to all the other forums I have enjoyed over the years, this one is a walk in the park.




I agree with Mari on this. Oh and one more thing: Please update the stickies that need it. I'm pretty sure some of that information is out of date.

It always was.

Even during the absolute worse days people are thinking back on with horror - it still was nothing compared to the average busy, lightly moderated internet site.

Probably because of the limited access involving people having to provide payment info to log on and post..

Imho, updating the stickies is an excellent example of a place where forum volunteers (not just from the list Robin thanked, any competent set of volunteers) could help LL, with LL setting some guidelines to ensure that new stickies get reviewed by the community.
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Heck, the Forums are even tame compared to the comments on the blog.

I cracked up when I read this because it's so true. Makes one wonder how there could be any excuse not to loosen the reigns on the forum a bit and give us a GD forum.

A suggestion on the structure of the forums: I would also like to add a subforum for "Other Virtual Worlds". If need be, the administrator could add subcategories for specific platforms.

IMO, the focus of this subforum should be to compare/contrast those worlds with SL.
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To me that'd be liking having the McDonald's forums (if there is such a thing) with a sub-forum about other fast food restaurants. Sure, we all know others exist, but we can't expect a company to encourage their discussion on their own site. I shudder whenever I see someone posting here asking about WoW or Entropia. It just seems damned inapropriate.

I think this one is best left to third party forums.

I like when they mention WoW, it alerts me to a probable griefer.

I can see feeling that way. But here's where I'm coming from: I am very interested in LL's "co-opetition" position with respect to other grid platforms, so news about Open Life Grid (who is working fairly closely with LL on grid interoperability) would be nice. Other grid platforms will presumably be of interest as well.

LL's people probably don't have a lot of time to compare/contrast other grids. I would thnk that hearing feedback from users on features that would be of particular interest within SL would be helpful too. In return for a little "advertisement" risk, LL gets a bunch of corporate spies on other grid developers' work.

Did I say that out loud?
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