About this Forum

In what sense is this actually a forum in which to post questions for Linden Lab Town Halls?

Will any questions from this forum be selected to be asked and answered at a Town Hall?

Are there any Linden staff members who read this forum in order to select questions to be asked and responded to at town hall meetings, and if so, which employees?

Is there any way to know which questions (if any) have been selected to be asked at a town hall meeting?

Since this is supposedly a forum for asking questions to be answered at town hall meetings, is there any real purpose to discussions by residents regarding the questions?

Good question.
And to be a little hypocritcial--by discussing the question--I think that the reason residents discuss the topics is either:
1) The OP is wrong and someone else points it out
2) The topic is one of heated debate and everyone has to get their say in edgewise
3) The OP is right, but the question has been answered previously and subsequent posts are answering it (again)

I suspect it may have been the result of a moment of desire to defuse objections made by people that can't attend the town halls, on the part of one staff member, now made into a forum that is useless for it's stated purpose, but which serves as another General forum, along with the other forum that is stated to not be a General forum but which is in fact serving as a General forum, Resident Answers.

This forum WOULD be doing it's job if the answers gotten at the Town Hall showed up in the various threads.
Or if threads who expired in usefulness (i.e. hot debates, answered questions, etc) were deleted/locked/moved.

The funny thing is, this forum was created specifically for residents to post questions for the townhall meeting, and as sue has pointed out, it has already become the new General Forum. If they were to close this forum, it wouldn't ruffle my feathers personally, but I guarantee there'd be someone posting a rant over in the other General Forum ala RA about how the Lindens closed down YET ANOTHER forum.

My suggestion would be to leave this forum in place, move the current OT threads into RA or other appropriate forums, and disable replies here. Residents post their questions for the next town hall, Lindens can reply if they want, but it remains uncluttered by unnecessary and off topic commentary. I would also strictly moderate it, and remove the various editorials, open letters, and generalized ranting and complaining that don't even remotely resemble an actual question. People will bitch about that too, but tough beans.

Another thought would be to reinstate the General Forum, and encourage people to gravitate toward that forum for general discussion, since it is already taking place in SEVERAL topic-specific forums, where for the most part it's un-moderated. We would all benefit from fewer off topic discussions in these forums. Is it perhaps time to consider giving General Forum another go? I know Strife is a pretty busy guy, and works very hard over on the wiki, but given the liberties people are already taking here and in RA, I don't think this would generate much additional traffic, but it would certainly work to contain general traffic which is currently all over the place. If more moderators are needed, recruit more from the Resident pool.

These are my random thoughts for the day.

As long as my suggestion of posting a consise responce to each thread when it's been answered. Not everyone reads or attends the Town Hall.