The forums will be closed in....

Nah, forums will live on forever.

Exactely. Just like the war in Iraq. If we pulled out now, the terrorists would only come to the US.

Most definitely. I love our coffee shops over here. And our giant autos. America is great, really.

Oh man, I love that Italians moved here. I could not live without Pizza!!!!

Ha ha ha ha... omg! hilarious post!!

How is everything going in 2003?

Man, just wait till Anshe Chung arrives!!!!!!

Or a really good red sauce.. yummmmmmmmmm

I wont vote since i belive the forums are a important part of the community and i don't think LL would ever remove it. I do understand your consern since I too can't tollerate some of the garbage i see here.

I don't believe Linden Lab will ever totally remove the forum. It is honestly too late to do so anyway, the damage has already been done. This should have been done two and a half years ago.

The community feeling we all felt growing at the beginning was crushed with the arrival of land fees, thirty months of divisive forum drama, and Linden Lab's slide from innovative technology creator to forum police. Resident based solutions to community destruction such as the ResMod program and live help are leaky band aids that ooze ineptitude and even more community divisiveness.

If you examine the progress Linden Lab has made over the past two years you will find that there has not been a truly innovative feature added since 2004. Almost everything that has been added for users are features that were already in the system, just waiting for Linden Lab to write a couple hours of code to expose them to user access. Even the useful features that have been cobbled on to the system have been purposely crippled to prevent community malcontents from abusing them. Where is Havoc X? Where is HTML on a prim? Where are the dozens of other promised features promised by Linden Lab and eagerly awaited by the community? Gone into the resource pit of community moderation.

Over the past two years Linden Lab has shown a tendency to take over popular and useful user generated content. I don't foresee them letting a third party take over a system that has so much potential to damage their business model and their future ability to sell it. A forum in Linden Lab hands effectively prevents large numbers of users from migrating to a more unbiased environment, allowing them to control the discourse to an extent.

In reality it doesn't matter anymore. Most of the real content creators that are still around are just killing time, waiting and hoping for a competitor to Second Life to arrive in the market.

I sure hope someone is listening...

No forums?!
But then what will we do during all the grid downtime?

What would i do ALL the time? ;p I multitask cuz 1 task isnt good enough to keep me busy.

They won't...they serve a purpose. you see, while folks are ranting here, they aren't trying to hunt down and violently abuse the nearest Linden. The forums are a Linden Safety Device!

While dining at the North Shore Restaurant during the evening of June 30th, the day the Second Views residents met with the Lindens in San Francisco, the subject of the forums came up. One Linden asked everyone at the table, "How many think we should just close the forums?" Almost every hand went up.

So they are thinking about it. The question may have been in jest or it may have been an attempt to float the possibility in front of a group of residents. My gut reaction was to not raise my hand as I think this is one of the few (if not only) avenues that residents can utilize to address the community as a whole. Only a fraction of the world's population utilize the forums, but they are there for everyone to use should they be so inclined. I said that I thought the forums should continue so folks could have a place to vent, voice their concerns and be heard.

It is a drain on resources. And the question put forth at that table showed that there is frustration and a desire to find a solution for what must be a very time consuming and overwhelming task. An endless river. I don't envy thier journey as they try to navigate addresing resident concerns, being accountable to investors and fulfilling their own vision of what Second Life means. Some of those currents overlap while others crash into each other with opposing force. The forums are many things. So the decision to continue them doesn't seem like one that they would take lightly.

Linden Lab seems to value and desire good communication as a whole. That was reflected in the Lindens I met. The hard part is actually making it happen effectively. They like to experiment and try new things which don't always work out. But they seem okay with that, like scientists trying out different experiments to see what works. See the second installment to my Second Views trip, "The Glass Is Half Full," in this thread for an example of just a few minor communication breakdowns I experienced with the Lindens.

I don't know how much they feel the pain of what it means to be on the receiving end of some of these experiments as a resident. They feel the scientist's pain and the frustration of managing the resident complaints, concerns and feedback as providers and Keepers of The Grid. I think it's more difficult for them to walk in the residents' shoes and know what it's like to lose your land in a parcel sale snafu, have your livelihood wiped out by an update change or your second life altered when griefers discover a new way to antagonize. Their main job is to keep The Grid up and growing. They don't necessarily live out thier lives here.

Perhaps they may close the forums so they can concentrate on the Grid's upkeep and improvement. But if they do, it will silence a segment of the population and a voice that almost all of us have access to. The Lindens have muted a few residents already. Do we want them to turn a deaf ear to the rest of the forum users too?

Long life censorship! Close the forums down! Squelch the noise that is the populace, and keep your favorite Linden near if you have such access. Discussion is not allowed, only pure consumerism. May the SL fascist state reign supreme!

Why all this talk of closing down the forums? What's wrong with them exactly? Don't like free speech? Can't take criticism? Geeze.

Perhaps it's not a deaf ear that they need to turn but rather a more selective one. The residents are wanting immediate feedback by the Lindens. Their reasons are as varied as the cries for help. Has the program grown beyond their ability to answer each and every inquiry? Of course it has. There doesn't happen to be enough employees of LL to respond to all questions, concerns, or inquiries.

The answer may lay in management or specifically human resource management. Create a way to break the AR reporting into categories. Sort them as quickly as possible and send them to a variety of employees not just a couple of overworked ones.

The system needs to be reorganized as well. LL, address people’s concerns legitimately. There are major issues with trademark/copyright violations that you have stated are being addressed as soon as you become aware. We aren’t seeing where filing AR reports is the way of seeing this issue stopped. There’s the problem. IF filing AR is where you want these notices to go, then make the system work. Force the employees in charge to do their job! Once they do their job, you will see a reduction in complaints in the forums. Case in point, when a main grid resident’s water slide ended up on the teen grid, a Linden intervened, came into the forums and reassured this resident that the issue had been cleared up. The forum noise from this specific incident stopped.

If the forums aren’t where you want to see complaints, then you aren’t being realistic in today’s society. The babyboomers from WWII are THE biggest complainers there are. They are also the ones that will demand that something gets fixed! I thought for a long time, this philosophy and ethic was reserved for those 50 to 70 year olds. Looking at the forum threads that have a legitimate complaint and want their story told, I see that younger generations have similar behaviors. They see an injustice and want it fixed. LL, you don’t want it made public in the forums, then your employees have to do their job right the first time when it comes to solving in world disputes and issues.

Residents that want immediate responses from LL are also being unreasonable. We residents have this notion that “Live Help” means just that..they will help! In reality, most can only lend a sympathetic ear and nothing more. Well then LL, give them power to help us and in turn help you! Live Help must have the statistics as to what are the top 5 - 10 pressing issues residents have when they contact Live Help. Give them the ability to go, clean up the problem and move on. If they are trusted enough to work in “Live Help” then trust them enough with more powers and abilities.

Get organized LL with the forums and issues raised. Your residents are not going away and 90% of them don’t want to see SL go away either and be replaced by a better product. They want THIS one to be that better product. Stop being swamped by issues that can be resolved by just being better organized.

Utter nonsense.

If you dislike it so much, just go. Fight in Iraq.

I hadn't thought about this, but will.

Soon, you forgot to say "soon."

So?

Which Linden was it?

How many hands went up, out of how many possible?

How many hands went up compared to how many SL users there are?

Whose hands were up, and whose were down?

How many of those hands that went up belonged to new users with questions about scripting, designing clothing and textures, creating animations, making videos, and so on?

It's not surprising that knowledgeable old-timers don't feel the need for a place to ask questions. They know a lot already, and have a bunch of friends to turn to.

Cow Hand, read, research, talk to those that have been here a long time...it's not utter nonsense. LL is worried about that next program but are they worried enough to fix this one before it happens?

Originally Posted by Editorial Hare:
In reality it doesn't matter anymore. Most of the real content creators that are still around are just killing time, waiting and hoping for a competitor to Second Life to arrive in the market.People keep making knowing references to impending competitors to SL, and the vagueness is driving me insane; I need names, dammit, NAMES!!

coco coco coCo COCO COCO coco cOcO coco coco CoCO COCOCOCO coco coCO

Here's an older version of this thread and here's an interesting old thread from the days we thought the forums were salvagable.

I think its better off with items that apply to sl no off topic bla bla bla.....see how screwed up these forums have gotten.. close them off to only sl related subject matters.