Changes to Hotline Forum

Well, as Eggy warned me some time ago, the hotline forum is growing beyond my ability to keep up with it. The original concept was that it would be a place for people to find answers about Second Life policies or to share ideas. Instead it's becoming a source of irritation, especially for people who have problems that are better answered through other venues.

I think the name makes the situation worse, as it implies immediacy although we don't promise immediate answers. Another is that the forums can't serve as an adequate substitute for support, but the hotline is used that way by many. Yet another issue is that common questions are repeated because there's no FAQ.

I want to keep the line of communication open, but not at the risk of irritating people. So here's my plan:

- change the name to Second Life Answers
- make it clear that support requests and individual performance problems will be removed without a response
- remove the existing sub-forums, move the existing responses to an archive for search, and create a new sub-forum for FAQs
- set an expectation that questions will be responded to within 5 days. Urgent problems need to be addressed to support (and yes, they will be answered!).
- when there's a problem raised that affects everyone, for example traffic payments fail to run, I'll let people know what's going on through one response, sticky it, and then address updates through the announcements forum. Additional reports will be removed.

Thoughts? Ideas? Let me know!

What about replies to SLLM threads?

I like it! /stamp

p.s. Eggy is SOOOO FIC!

Sounds completely reasonable to me.

Makes sense to me.

Perfect.

Entirely reasonable.

I think renaming it will definitely help. Even so, you'll still get folks who don't read and thus don't get it. Look at the PR forum.

I am totally against this.

Not the Hotline to Linden changes, which I think are great, but the sign.

My posts will be ruined without . How the heck would people know how irate i was without . You are really making me .

Ya'll are gonna get a

Looks good to me.

I suggest you ban me from it

The only thing that might be a problem with this is that it implies that they will get an answer, which could frustrate residents who don't. Also, people might mistake it for the tech support forum.

Maybe consider focusing more on the 'direct' aspect, i.e. "Direct to Linden", which suggests roughly the same concept as 'hotline', without so much of the immediacy connotation you get with 'hotline'.

Removed completely, or just move them to another forum, ie Technical Issues?

The sad thing is, most people will probably not read a set of FAQs unless it's really obvious, like right in the middle of the screen. If there is a way to have vBulletin put up a special message only when posting to that forum, i'd suggest having some kind of clickthrough screen that tries to direct them to the FAQ or Live Help first, and if their issue isn't resolvable with, or applicable to those, then to proceed to post.

A link to the support email address could also be added to the click-through message (if it's possible).

This sounds good. Also if residents could be encouraged to use descriptive titles (rather than things like "can u fix this?" or "Hey, question for you!", it will make it easier to see that someone has already posted on the issue.

When I read this, the first thing that popped into my head was 'Haha, Linden Direct, sounds like Factory Direct, get your very own Linden at wholesale prices!'

To streamline the process even further I propose the creation of a forum called "Second Life Questions" for use by those with inquiries. The forum would be post only. By which I mean there will never be any answers. This reduces staff involvement to a minimum.

I love the ideas Robin!

I agree that the name "Second Life Answers" can still be too much of a commitment.

"Question the Lindens"
"Questions for Lindens"
"Tell us your questions"

Something that focuses on the fact that questions can be asked, but may not *always* get a response. I dunno. May help. I could be way off though.

I also propose that the following be added as a sticky for the forum:

What about renaming it, "Who pissed in your cheerios and why should we fix it?"

Sounds reasonable to me.

In the meantime, can you help me? My system keeps crashing. I'm playing SL on a really high-end system, its a PC-compatible 4.77mhz/10mhz machine with a TURBO button. I know its really fast and high end because it says TURBO. It has DUAL 360 kilobyte floppy drives and I'm hoping to upgrade to a 30 meg MFM hard drive when Santa comes this year. I have a 320x240 4-color CGA monitor that ROX. Why wouldn't SL be working right on my machine, I mean, its super fast TURBO!

Reboot it. If that doesn't work, try using a bigger boot.

Excellent!

This will certainly go a long way to alleviating all visible symptoms of the underlying problem. Um… hang on though… wouldn’t it be better to cure the underlying problem!?

Currently, the Hotline is a good measure of the level of frustration being experienced by your customers. Currently, it is the only venue where there is any onus on LL to publicly comment on the issues that are frustrating your customers.

Yesterday, it was announced… no preamble, no hint that it was coming… that a new update was available and that one of the things it would address was slow land texture loading.

Where was the announcement acknowledging the problem in the first place? This isn’t communication. This is leaving everyone frustrated, and then bemoaning the fact that a few customers have the audacity to post in an LL sponsored forum. Do you not understand why people post to the Hotline? It really isn’t to piss you off, it’s because the alternative is a vacuum of silence.

Fill that vacuum and the Hotline will work just fine as it is.