Linden Lab Blog Changes to Give Residents More Choices

Yes, this.

Just lock it if anything, transferring is a horrible idea.

Seems to me, you keep asking for feedback from your customers, but you don't listen to the feedback you get in most cases. Example: Your talking about SL having a big outage for serious upgrades, you typically announce it on the block, and a resident, replies with "Woot, way to go LL!", this warm comment, though needed to be made by the author, and no doubt highly valued by the Linden Lab employee being paid by our subscriptions and fees to do a job, actually contributes zero to the communication and or the process of communicating.

You have a lot of very active, intelligent and serious players, many invest thousands of US Dollars a month in your business, they give you dynamic feedback gained from experiance , borne often from frustration and balanced with a viewpoint that your wage payers have a real issue with. Yet, sadly, "Woot, way to go Linden Labs" seems to get the benefit of proactive feedback and increased communication!

You have an active customer base, your product is, even with is faults, an extremely attractive product for a great many people, you degrade the quality of game play, you erode the functionality, you add more restrictions and you mess around with values and promises. Any other company would be losing customers like a plague was in town, but you don't seem to have realised we are still here, probably because your listening to , "Woot..."

Your Metrics are wrong. You are resolving the land sales market completely wrong by not including the right data in your decision process, I can prove it. Look at the number of sims that are changing hands at silly low prices, and or the number of mainland plots that are not turning over (churning) in a given period of time. You have too much land for the number of players on line at any time.

Your metrics this weekend said, '58,000' users on line... Its wrong. I visited one island with 40, yes 40 campers, all bots, all belonged to the owner of the sim... I went to a function, 50 plus people there, only one avatar was a real person, the rest, were bots. Please, tell us with some accuracy who is on line, ie, 3000 Active users with account info, 20 thousand Guests, 27 thousand concurrent registrations of secondary registrations. in other words, instead of 50,000, its actually only 3000, now that, dear Linden Labs employee, is a metric that would enable me to decide whether or not to have my land for sale at what price.

Communicate, yes please, communicate with real facts, yes please, communicate with honesty, YES PLEASE, communicate looking for adoration and congratulatory woots? No Thanks.

River Ely.

Thank you for the feedback, Robin. I feel a little more comfortable about it if the moderators is in fact merely bring attention to Lindens like the old Linden Review process, but if it results in the bizarre stuff we've seen in the Burning Life thread... well, there is cause for trepidation.

I agree with Viktoria that perhaps leaving the archives in place is best, so that formatting, links, etc. are not lost.

I'm almost afraid to post here because I seem to be missing something since I don't feel a strong negative reaction to this.

I don't know why but I always thought the forums were in a transition period. They were loosely moderated, the RA forum was really a general discussion thread dominated by a few residents (and very entertainingly too) and they were very hard to search.

I get the sense that there will be more Linden interaction not less which is what I thought people wanted.

But its pretty obvious that some residents don't feel heard or valued as customers.

For now, I'm going to remain optimistic. I would love the general discussions to keep going maybe in a separate General Forum and return RA to its original purpose.

It may be actually pretty amusing for an non SLer outside mod to try to decipher where a long discussion on the difference between Gor and BDSM falls within the guidelines.

On and one more thing...woot, woot, woot!

I see mention of a "FRENCH" forum in Robin's annoucement.

Is it an error or can wee hope for an forum in french ?

Seems like an LL employee told me the image attachments would be preserved in place, that they valued the historical record of SL's early residents and creations. Shortly thereafter they were removed.

Speaking of things being removed, if we get new, different forum software, are the classified forums still going to exist?

Will the new forums be pre-moderated? (post don't appeared till approved by a moderator?)

This just doesn't add up. These outside mods are specifically being brought in to "free up" Linden time. A Linden is not going to re-investigate anything. That would defeat the economic purpose of this new institution. LL will take the suggestion from these trusted aides and then "officially" enact it. It matters not to me who's finger pushes the red button, these new merc-mods are the ones in control. Obviously that's LL's choice to make (which appears already made). But likewise, the residents are free to choose that they don't like it and leave. If LL doesn't want anyone using their forum like a forum, they should just admit that and delete the whole thing.

There *needs* to be a *designated* General Discussion/off-topic area. LL often talks about user content and how SL wouldn't be much of anything without the user contributions. SL is a community driven thing. People bond in world *and out*. What difference does it make if people are chatting in 3D or 2D? People like to talk. I don't understand how you can add RL voice to the 3D, but bemoan conversation on the forum. But I fully agree with others that it should be kept out of the more informative areas. I think it's unrealistic to expect people to just stop doing it. And the idea of gestapo-mods waging their finger at folks is a frightening idea. Just set aside a little space for it, it's not that big a deal.

The forum structure could do with a re-think, as I feel there are too many forums and not all of them are useful, some in fact have very unclear uses. Further to this, having them all visible at once is a bit annoying, as I for one rarely use the product/service forums. A much tighter, more useful forum structure would be better, properly categorised so you can quickly drill down into the areas you want.

Language handling within the forums could be better as well, I think it would be best if you could flag a forum topic as being posted in a particular language, then in your user preferences you would specify which languages you want to see topics for.

I'm unsure about bumping thread posts to the top, as you could end up removing a post from its context. If perhaps there was a sidebar or something that let you jump to "important" posts then it could be helpful. I don't think it would become a popularity contest as if it did it quickly become useless and no-one would care anyway.

On the topic of moderators, I think it would be best to "hire" from within the community; offer incentives like a free premium account for as long as you are a moderator, and provide the community with tools to rate a moderator's performance or dispute actions that they feel are unfair.

okay, Im dense and need something explained to me.......

someone posts in a thread and the outsider decides it isnt on topic......

1. They remove it until a Linden makes the final decision or

2. They mark it without removal until a Linden makes a final decision?

It works great....if you like an echo chamber with the ___insert forum / company name here___ haleliujah chorus of fanboys shouting down dissent while sucking up, it is fine!

A few years back, the forums were a passionate place for debate and discussion. In Second Life terms, they were the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia. It was good, smart people disagreeing, yelling, fighting, agreeing, helping one another, in various measures at various times, in the quest of a common goal.

Then, all passion was shut down and closed off. The "forum regulars" at the time flocked to third party sites to continue to express their passion for the platform, and virtual worlds in general. It is good to see that Linden Lab is acknowledging that passion is now missed.

The most important thing to me, if this is going to work, is to allow the people who really care to debate, discuss, disagree, yell, rant, rave... but be honest. We've had to go to third party forums for this over the past few years, as I mentioned above: don't let this new venture back to forums turn into a purely sanitary place.

Second Life is a work of art in progress. The finished product should be beautiful, but don't forget, until it is complete, any work of art in progress is messy as hell.

Regards,

-Flip

I think the magic will be to restore that, but still not have the drama queens take over the forum utterly.

The Continental Congress is a perfect example. Imagine what it would have been like if someone came in and danced around during the Continental Congress discussions in a weenie suit.

This is why the form of moderation is so important. Not 1 or 2 week bans or inworld suspensions. But frequent warnings, 1 and 3 day forum suspensions for personal attacks, stuff like that.

We especially don't need the mob-mentality chorus of laughs and "yeah that's" and thumbs up for popular 'in crowd' people. That kind of nonsense drives off more residents than the occasional lone arse. Even worse, it attracts the sort of people who desperately need to fit in to such groups.

* * * * *

What I'd like to see is the old forum structure restored.

There wasn't anything wrong with it!

The problem was the rapid growth during the boom times, and not enough resources available then to tame an out of control forum.

I'm curious to hear precisely how you would restore things, Flip, if it was up to you.

Amen Flup!!

I lived in the Forums till they closed, what a great place it was. But I didn't drift off to any others, just stuck to my own business in SL and I have always felt the loss.

With love from Pituca

An outside source will be watching out for the forums then dealing with the AR's?
If I am understanding this correctly it just doesnt sound good to me. They will have the ability to ban our accounts in world too for something that happens in a forum?
Sorry I just need that part clarified.
I just dont think the outside company is a great idea if they have no idea about SL.

It's great to see LL commit to a timeframe for forum updating! I think outsourcing moderation is an interesting move that could be good; it is very possible that a professional group of moderators will be less arbitrary than resmods and marketing Lindens who have been drafted

I hope the new moderators will monitor the forums for a while before they take the reins, so that they have some feeling for the community and personalities involved.

Just a few points:

1. Please take special care in moving the content fora (Scripting Tips, Building Tips, Scripting Library) forward, so that threads there are searchable IN THE SAME SEARCH used in the new forum. In other words, if I search for "Teleport script", it is important that hits from both old and new threads appear in the results. It will also be necessary that threads in the new forums be able to link easily to posts in the archived content forums. Note that links between the Scripting Library and Scripting Tips postings are vital, and should be preserved.

2. It might ease people's anxieties if you were able to say something about the moderation style LL will direct your contractors to employ. Specifically, will free-ranging criticism and discussion of LL inworld policy be allowed? If not, what limits would you like to see? Despite the fact that I see a lot of critique of LL's policies on these forums now, on some 3rd-party sites it is still gospel that LL limits criticisms here. I would like to see a definitive statement from LL on freedom of speech in the forums.

As for other thoughts on forum restructuring and policies, Robin, you have those from me already from the lobbying Qie and I did -- if you remember, we did a fair amount of canvassing the forum community at that time. If you would like us to forward those to Katt or anyone else, let one of us know.

Far more politely put than my 'echo chamber of fanboys', but you are usually far more eloquent and much less blunt. But subtlety is NOT my strong suit.

The whole vote up-vote down thing runs great risk of turning the new forum into 'groupthink central' if not an outright cesspool dominated by a few personalities (much like SC was and to a lesser extent the SLU forums curently are).

Heya Robin, Katt & Jeska!

Since we're talking revamps, I'd like to drag up an old suggestion I made in /13/bc/161173/1.html for your consideration. Or even to just keep in the back of your head as you work out the details of the new deal.

Yes I hate the idea of voting. It will make things so much worse then it is hear. Of all things this is what I dislike the most from the recent developments.

What's the time frame for these changes? Next month? Next year?

Have the new software packages been chosen?

Are you planning gradual changes or will we log in one day and find everything's changed?

Please keep the Classifieds. They are one thing everyone can use, and they don't hurt anyone!!

coco

The voting idea is silly and will lead to people complaining of cliques.

On enforcement, I'm assuming you mean enforcement of bans and that the moderators will be free to moderate the forums without having to ask a Linden everytime they see the need to delete a thread or a post?

Desmond: you know what, you might be on to something. There really wasn't anything wrong. In fact, I think Linden Lab should have promoted them more. The way I stumbled upon the SL forums was when a friend sent me a link to a thread discussing my purchase of Indigo. Apparently, rumors were flying that I was a corporate conglomerate looking to pwn the metaverse!

I'd go back to that as well; and add some of the features I've fallen in love with at SLU (the Agree, Laugh and Thanks buttons... can't... live... without!). I disagree with those who say SC and SLU were / are "cesspools" - that is completely unfair. Every forum will have regulars, and at once, I was an SL forums newbie but came to know the community of characters, and find my own way to fit in. That is the same with ANY forum, and singling out SC and SLU is unfair. Most new arrivals there say they got a much more warm welcome than they expected, and people prefer to slag SLU rather than coming in and saying hello.

We only bite when it is requested, after all!

Pituca: I feel your loss as well. A nice community got very fractured.

I still think my idea of making Siggy Romulus and Magnum Serpentine moderators of the SL forums with total admin powers was a really GREAT idea.

Regards,

-Flip

Yes, and if they'd been assigned the job, the shrieks of "FIC!" would be deafening. OTOH, people not in SL lack experience and thus, in the view of some here, shouldn't be given the job of moderation either.

So, to Linden Lab, I say that since people will complain no matter what, just do what you think best.