Rants and Raves Forum?

Every so often I see a suggestion that a forum be created for rants and raves.

My memory says that the forums at one point were so filled with brouhaha and verbal altercation that there was a Rants and Raves forum created, and that rather that serving as an escape valve the special purpose forum was apparently seen more as a challenge to see who could be the most annoying and insulting and the end result was that the Rants and Raves forum was closed.

Am I somewhere close to right or am I just having a false memory problem?

Yes, at one time there was a Rants and Raves forum. However, because there were apparently ranting and raving, LL closed it.

My understanding is that the Rants and Raves section was closed because it failed in its intended purpose. The Lindens hoped that providing a place for users to air their grievances unhindered would improve the tone of the rest of the sections. Apparently just the opposite happened and Rant & Rave brawls spilled over into the rest of the forum and actually made the tone worse.

I remember when we had a "Rants and Raves" forum back in TSO beta, it was all about the game defects - I mean, that's what people ranted about.

When the game went live, that forum was closed down and hidden away, lol.

coco

As a suggestion, (becaue I have suggested a "rants" column before), I find these sort of things only work if they:

- Are *just* rants, (no raves)
- There are *no* follow-ups, (no discussion of points or back and forth at all).

I have seen that work before.

I think the problem with the other approach is that you are essentially fooling yourself that such a forum is about "discussion" or that it could be made as equally positive as it is negative, or ...
(insert any other politically correct misconception about the nature of dialogue here)

When it works, it's a steam valve, not a debate, and it is *guaranteed* to offend someone, that being pretty much the point almost. If people can live with such a thing, I think it would be healthy to have, but I severely doubt anyone is really ready for that here.

I started a poll on this a while back:

/108/48/40344/1.html

I just went and voted yes on it!

coco

At one point on an earlier, less descriptively-named version of the forums, there was a forum named "Lewd, Rude and Just Plain Crude", introduced around the time of the first "Rants and Raves" forum. Unfortunately, rather than it ending up as the forums, but with swearing, all the crazy bigots came out of the woodwork and used it as their personal soapbox. It didn't last long, as I recall.

The problem with trying to create a "flamewars only" forum, or to categorize debate by volume or causticity is that it not only implies approval for such behavior, but it also tends to cause threads to end up there, as there's now a category for moderators to send threads that turn bad, rather than interceding and editing messages closing the thread, or both.

This actually brings up something that's been on my mind for a while: That's the problem with a flat default message system, rather than a branching tree structure; it allows threads to be greviously hijacked, effectively ruining debate and conversation. It allows threads to get so radically off-topic, a new one has to be created to address --guess what?-- the original topic. Honestly, if we could have threads that branched by default, that veered in and out of different forums or categories as appropriate, I feel that there simply wouldn't be any need for a specific Rants and Raves forum.

A rant forum would be okay if it were noreply so we could issue our rants without starting long threads of insults and general hatefulness.

Perhaps wacky, but just for fun...

A vision of a future SL "forum" ...

- You access it in-world by calling up a list of topics.
They appear as a scattered field of "seeds" on the ground.

- You right-click the "should Prok be banned" seed, and select "plant."
It grows up into... a tree.

- As you select the branches of the tree, each expands to show the ever smaller threads or branches leading off.

- You can expand or collapse trees or debates, and "leaves", or perhaps "fruit" hanging on the brances indicates intersections with other trees or debates or links to off-world/off-site material.

- You might see some topics that you are interested in but not likely to jump into at the moment, you "pick" those leaves off the tree and put them in your pocket.
"Planting" them in the ground anywhere in SL will access (live!) the "tree" for that debate.

- You might carry around three or four of the most popular (to you) leaves so you can check the tree for your favorite topics when you have time.
Every once in a while when you pull one out you see that it is wilted and brown.
No tree grows. Jeska has closed the thread again.

- You see a large "bushy" part on the bottom of the Prok tree, where all the angry and empty talk is happening. So you select instead that one small branch going off at the top where just you and another have been talking quite amiably ....

What a relief! In the old days you would have had to read all that crap at the bottom.