Noisenoisenoise

Good grief... innane polls, incessent attacks, paranoid rantings, random complaints, and infinite trolling... is the General Forum good for anything other than wasting bandwidth?

I seem to remember a time when it was a USEFUL tool, rather than the anarchistic playground of 3 dozen or so miscreants, myself included.

Could we, you know, come together and start using this forum for actual discussion, rather than non-sequitor image placement and "ROFLMAO" thread polls?

LF

A wonderful idea. And if not, there's an "asylum from the madness" thread hidden away in a little-used forum that sane people could escape to. For a little while, perhaps.

I just killed a bug on my computer screen with my finger.

How 'bout them Dodgers?

The forums always get like this when people can't get inworld.

Consider the past week had a town hall meeting and discussion about that, and people have been having login problems for the past 3 days, I'd say we're doing okay, no?

It doesn't suprise me, this RRL = Really Redundant Loop

and

er... on the positive side, hey, we can start our own forums right?

(Joke... yes.)

It's an 8-Track. WTF do you expect? Bam Margera and Don Vito?

Kraftwerk.

LOL. Spaaaaacelaaaaaab...

Autobahn was my favorite.

When was this time that the general forum was a useful tool? That must've been way back in Beta before my time.

Other avenues of communication have supplanted the forums, of late. So it still happens, just not here

I know its tacky, but the forums are chernobyl, and we're still weathering the fallout. Maybe in a year it will get better.

What Kim said.



Open source=closed society. But it's always possible to lurk on IRC

I know its tacky, but the forums are chernobyl, and we're still weathering the fallout. Maybe in a year it will get better.

Yeesh, now there are people being accused of being radioactive???

Khamon there are more than a few people that I try to read everything they post - you included. Many of your post are insightful, even ones in the General Forum. IMO, your perceptions re: L$ and it's impact on SL were prophetic.

Keep the faith!

Maybe I am seeing the past with rose colored glasses but I feel like the forums started their slide late 2004 and just took a nosedive in the last few months. Prior to that, I really liked the forums. We had trolls but they didn't infect every facet of the community. You could step around them and continue a discussion.

I recall the biggest drama was the "Taco Rubio Upskirt Museum" debate. I mean Taco and I were really passionate about our opposing views on the subject and a ton of people joined the debate. It raged on for three threads, about 80 pages, and HUNDREDS of posts...(good GOD!) Yet not once did a Lindens have to step in to chastize the posters, delete a post, or lock down a thread. Our discussion just never went down to that level.

Something has changed since then.

The longer-term slide . . . that's got a couple of causes. It's a phase online communities typically go through at this stage of development. It's always a rocky ride at this point, due to technical and social issues of a relatively new site that's growing pretty fast. However, good community management can act like Dramamine, and fewer people will spew all over the forums. Also, good forum moderation can clean up the spew before others, revolted, contribute their own spew. <image from "The Revenge of Lardass Hogan">

OMG! Great, Kraftwerk has a song called "Radioactivity" too.

Well..some may want the forums to be sedate and mellow and always reasonable, always polite, always useful, but while I can see the value of those types of discussions, I think there is also room for passionate arguements, silly nonsense and general chaos.

Read the threads you want, ignore the others. That's like someone telling me what I can watch on TV in my own home, or what I can do in the bedroom. We all have absolute control of the content we read on the forums. It's called choice.