Linden Lab Blog Changes to Give Residents More Choices

Make sure that urls can be reached by clicking on them. This copy me into your address-line is ridiculous.
If that will stay as it is now and here, I'll refuse to read...

With all respect, Strife - that's every last one of us. Sooner or later.

The vBulletin software has been in use for years now but the staff doesn't seem to be able to do things like archive obsolete forums or set forum and usergroup permissions so as to effeciently serve their needs. Is there any reason to think new forum software is going to be more effectively used?

I'm thrilled at the prospect of possibly having working forums again, but the chosen method seems silly and misguided to me. Sorry. To rehash a few things I'm sure have already been mentioned:

- there's absolutely nothing wrong with vBulletin if you keep it updated and learn to use it properly. New software will still need to be learned and periodically updated, and the learning curve will be greater - and LL will lose the benefit of the rest of the world's experience as documented all over the internet in user group forums and such, experience gained over many years of use.

- the existing forum database is of incalculable value, particularly in the content creation areas where an amazing wealth of information is available (even more if it could all be properly searched). Please don't undertake any conversion/archiving process lightly or be satisfied with a half-assed job that leaves it all as a monolithic lump of data to be browsed by the exceedingly bored out of nostalgia and historical curiosity. Even if compelling reasons exist to make a sweeping change to the forum's infrastructure, rendering what we have to date useless isn't worth it.

- LL doesn't need dynamic links from the blog to the forum and back or whatever it is you think this fancy new software will do. Let the blog be the public face of communication to your users, if that's what you want; a source of mini press releases, status reports, and hints and tips from Torley is just fine. Turn off replies on the blog and make a new forum thread for discussion of each blog post that warrants it, so we can have some discourse out of public view. And without your entire blog-reading population racing to reply before the post limit is reached, hopefully fewer trolls and less off-topic crap. It's not rocket science: post blog, start thread, post link to thread.

- outsourcing moderation is just nuts for lots of reasons. One I haven't seen mentioned (sorry if I missed it), and it's certainly not the most important, but perhaps worthy of some consideration: moderators who do not come from the community or from Linden Lab will not have the benefit of respect due to longstanding ties to Second Life. They won't be knowledgeable, they'll have no ties whatsoever to the community, they'll be in large part the same clueless noobs who can't get boxes off their heads. Except they'll have ultimate power, and therefore will be feared. Instead of being guided by the more experienced and even-tempered partners in this venture, we forum users will be kept in line by rookie cops on a new beat in an unfamiliar city carrying very large guns. Is that the atmosphere you want to promote?

Anyway, I really do hope we can have working forums again, but I'm unconvinced that the baby isn't going right out with the bathwater as currently planned. Best of luck

There are a couple of posts over on the Facelift thread, basically abandoning hope for Resident Answers--or anywhere on the official Forums--as a place for discussion of anything other than technical problems. I think this would be a serious mistake.

Although such discussions are difficult to moderate, a company with LL's stated corporate values should foster productive discussion of the social issues encountered in their virtual world. And I don't only mean such soft "values" as "corporate citizenship" but rather hard-nosed, bottom-line values of a company whose real competitive advantage is experience in the management of its virtual world (not the technology that runs it -- a common mistake).

With that understanding of LL's core competencies, it should be clear that it benefits from these topics being explored by residents in a sanely moderated forum. It would be inconsistent, myopic, and counterproductive to banish all such discussion to the samizdat of third-party forums and the tabloids of unofficial media.

As River states in this post, please communicate with real facts and honesty!

An update to the forums would be nice, outside moderation if it helps free up time for Linden employees to concentrate on other important issues seems good, but banning people from forum and world, who feel passionately about a particular subject not in line with the current Linden views seems to be completely counterproductive.

Will this just mean no posts will be made other than by a few WOOTER's and any constructive critism will be lost.

Is this the Linden plan?

I dont think it is but if so, please be honest tell us, we don't want your opinions, we never intend to comply with resident wishes, that way atleast we know not to waste any more of the Linden's time or our own.

I posted a lot recently on the Blog and Forum about Adfarming, a subject I feel very strongly about.

I have been suspended inworld for upsetting some individuals, who make their SL living through small plot extortion.
Have been warned in the forums for stating names of some of these individuals, my point is under your new rules I would probably be banned from second life just for my view point.

Though my point of view seems to be in line with the majority of users as was bourne out by the recent forum postings regarding changes to the Mainland.

I am an inexperienced poster and hold my hands up to mentioning names and understand that is not acceptable something I will certainly never do again.

However should people with valid points feel unable to speak out in the forums because they are worried about the inworld repercussions?

This seems to be the way in which you are heading please correct me if I am mistaken.

In addition may I politely point out the promises that were made by Jack Linden on changes to policy regarding the mainland expected for September, where are these policies, I haven't heard anything yet and am actively watching for the announcement.

Were those promises just more examples of Lindens taking customer feedback, uttering a few false promises to placate the masses and continuing to ignore the users?

A very disillusioned Lady

How about instead of wasting time with damn blogs and crap LL gets off their ass and works on a grid that will actually let members log in on in a while. I mean damn, if I had a nickel for every "Can't log in" or "SL had crashed" message I get, I could buy my own grid.

I love the way when you call to talk to LL they want to just hang up on you and when you call back, they tell you they are too busy to talk to you and hang up again, and when you call back again, they talk to you for a min telling you that if you are not a paid member then they don't care about your problems and they hangup on you.

Just a piece of constructive critisism for you, when you start a post by calling somebody a liar, they're probably less likely to read it all. Or maybe they'll read it but they'll remember the context - you started by calling them liars.

Sindy you are right, I don't intend to call them liars, I more intended to convey to them the way many people think, myself included.

Which is frustrated, not actually listened to and yet we still come here in the hope something will change, of course it is the continued problem of small plot extortion that bothers me, any increase in communication would be great.



Katt sorry if my previous post made you think I was calling you or Jack liars, it was meant to be more of a question - Can we believe you?, What are you doing? sort of thing picking up on the theme of distrust many of the posts seem to be feeling.

I do believe LL are trying their best, and understand how hard it must be to satisfy the demands of all users, but surely the repeated comments of distrust must be worrying to you, possibly these are due to a low number of Linden responses.

Timescales between responses have a lot to do with things maybe a few little posts to let us all know LL are still here reading the posts might help?




For me Second Life is a place to escape to, to relax and have fun, I very rarely crash and love the new look of the sea and sky to be honest I still enjoy my time in Second Life.
So consider that a WOOT from me

My main concern as I am sure you are all aware, is why in this virtual nirvana are the dishonest parasites still being allowed to leech of other users?

I have a simple suggestion.

Let's go back to 2005. Get rid of the blog. Update the forum software we're already using, it's fine, it works, it doesn't need to be replaced... it's just an old version missing a bunch of security fixes.

And have a few Lindens whose responsibility it is to be part of the forums.

Because, you know, it worked pretty well back then. Yes, SL is bigger now, but that SHOULD mean you can afford to dedicate more people to the job.

Forbidden by the TAO.

....and a year from now when LL declares the forums to be another failure and announce that now they will be focusing on the blog instead. What will you all think?



Cat

That we are stuck in some sort of Temporal Causality Loop?

The same thing I think now. That LL needs to stop worrying about this kind of BS and start worrying about getting its servers working right and start worrying about helping their customers with actual support. Not this crap "We offer a blog (but wont let you comment), We offer a forum (but wont reply to your calls for help), We offer support tickets (but won't respond back with any real support help)".

Seriously?

your html presence is horrible as it is

it took almost a year to change the word objects to prims on the land page

you left the scripters for dead with no documentation for months, thank god i had a copy of the wiki, which eventually turned into the rpgstats page, then expected us to totally rebiuld your doc's

you wanted to free up linden time with the resmods program, shuffled the cue twice, and almost a year later wonder why it was not working

your 3 weeks of no bb code has been ~17 months, it takes 5 minuets to upgrade, you updating scripts not re-building the database

you minimum requirements page list computer hardware thats not physically able to run SL, (i know my extra computer is just above min requirements and it barley operates for 10 min then crashes), then provide no tech support, and expect us to do it for you

now you have nazi linden running around unsupervised doing whatever she feels, when ever she decides to show up (i have an intolerance warning for something someone else did all the while receiving threat messages, thanks)

now your telling us your going to totally change what you have? you cant even upload a handfull of files and click 4 buttons to upgrade VB, nor change static text, nor ect ect ect

not to mention the voting, as others mentioned, will be used to draw linden attention to topics artificially inflated by alts, but it will create a whole new career path, 1000l$ gets you 100 votes on any topic you want pushed up

i seriously dread this



considering what i said above, i cant believe you



so thats to do whatever you feel whenever you feel like doing it? thats what we have now, and it barley works in world, it doesn't work at all when you clump us all together in one place

good luck with it all

Oh boy, it's VERY quiet on the blog. Not one new entry in about a week. Apart from future plans, it really doesn't give much confidence if companies start not talking to their customers.

Yep.. I'm a little confused.. Is the blog dead?

And what happened to the mainland stuff? Did that just wither and fade?

Blog silence may be partially explained by LL marketing/community folks getting ready for the Virtual Worlds convention, followed immediately by SLCC.
.

Well even inworld will become more calm, read please the rss feed when you can maybe log in again for some time.

This forum is laughable. It just shows what Lindenlabs intends to do - to make any critics mute.

The blog was a good institution - they took out the grid status and all.

Now they really can concentrate on themselves - one day they will realize that they are alone with thousands of bots.

Their policy really kills any enthusiasm - asking for participation and for volunteers for their events - it really makes me laugh.

Outages again for hours lol - someone who knows SL sometime knows it might be a new severdeploy.

But well nobody complains anymore - as there are no more possibilities to do so.

Well we can write in this new forum now. Nobody needs to read this anymore. Deep down in some forum nobody will notice.

I do not believe that there will more and better communication - my experience is that it always goes from bad to worse.

Have all a good day

(without Sl as logins are temporarily disabled)

Lonny

Good call: The SLim announcement from VW hit the blog (http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/09/03/connecting-second-life-to-real-life/) yesterday. Not much Linden technical involvement with that, but at least it's not dead silence at VW, which would be really embarrassing.

Also, expect a blog post from Jack in a few hours, announcing a new, "definitive" adfarming policy.

So the blog bottleneck may have eased a bit, even before all the conferences are done.

I'm back from SLCC and working on forum projects. You'll see more on this in the next few days.

I'd appreciate it if we could keep this thread on topic and avoid insults and name calling please?

Thanks!

What good is the blog now? I just logged in to find out there is a mandatory download for the Release Candidate upgrade. I am still trying to find any reference to this any place in the blog or on the download page. So is LL just totally disconnected from its clients now? Incommunicado?

FIX THE DAMN BUGS ALREADY!

NO NEW FEATURES TILL CURRENT ISSUES ARE SOLVED!

Fix #vwr- 7957
Fix The Client Stabilty!

No New Features Till Current Issues Are Solved!

FIX THE DAMN BUGS ALREADY!

Are there still going to be blog posts about new things like the RC viewer? I quit reading the forums a while ago because I got tired of all of the FUD, but now I have to comb through all of the sections just to get news updates.