Forums for individual sims :).

I would like to see forums in here for individual sims -- just because there are a lot of people working on sim-specific projects and I think it would really help new users get an idea about what is going on in each individual sim. For instance, our trees in slate -- or Blue or Darkwood, etc. It might also help old users get to know those folks in their sims who they don't run into much because they have different play schedules, etc. It might also help us discuss projects that residents of particular sims might want to propose to their neighbors but don't know how to contact them en masse, etc.

What do you think?

Zana

I love this idea!!

A forum for each sim would be nice for the neighbourhood spirit.

yeah!!

God, please, no!!

Sorry, guys. I have to attempt to derail this before it gets too much steam.

While this sounds like a good idea now, it will be much less attractive when we have 100/200/300 sims. Actually, when we get double the sims we have now, I think you'll find this to be a complete disaster.

If somebody actually runs with this idea, I would like to have a feature in the forums where I can ignore forums of my choice, and not even have them show up in the browse list. I really don't want to have to dig through 50+ forums that are 90% noise (to me) to get to the 10-15 forums that I actually want to read.

P.S. Maybe this is something someone might want to undertake on their own as a "fan site."

I second Grims notes on the subject!

There are too many forums already!
The last thing we need is MORE!

True, but it would be nice to have some kind of Sim directory of sorts, and perhaps that directory could double as a thread to post to.

Something where you could list yourself as a sim resident, where people could browse to see what differnet sims have in them

Though actualy going and seeing whats in a sim is probably what you should be doing

Isnt there a way to subscribe to only the forums you are interested in reading? I haven't tried it but there is a "Subscribe to Forum" link...

Subscribe to forum means it shows up in your control panel, under "forums you're subscribed to..." Might be a workable solution, if it weren't such a pain to get into the control panel.

I'm not sure about this system, but on some systems it also means you'll get an e-mail of every post posted in that forum.

maybe a feature could be added so sim forums need to be subscribed to manually before they report new messages?

This is vBulletin forum software. LL had to buy a license to use it. In other words, they didn't write it themselves.

I don't know if it's open-source or not, although I would doubt it. But even if it is, adding features to someone else's code base is almost always an excercise in frustration.

In short: Adding features to the forums may not be an option, and even if it is, it's probably not as easy as it sounds.

You may be right Grim, but for me personally I had to do a lot of digging around and asking questions to find out if there was even a community group in Slate, it's sometimes hard to know what's going on in your sim even if you are there a lot . But at the same time, I think when we do have 200-300 sims you are right -- it would be difficult to weed through them. But what are we talking, two or three years in the future for that? Maybe it's just me but I still think that even "regional" forums would be good -- i.e. Noreast, Northwest, Southeast, etc. etc. If only because it would help out dummies like me who aren't sure where to go to find out info .

Zana

I think regional would certainly be more managable. For now we could have "Core", "Outlands", and what I affectionatly refer to as "The Northern Wastes"

The only problem with regions is coming up with criteria for defining what regions there are, and which region a certain sim belongs in.

I don't approve of splintering off into different forum groups. United we stand and divided we fall. I live in Shipley and am member of Americana, but I enjoy reading the goings on in other sims, then I jog out to see what they are talking about.

Just get a message board like we in Americana did for internal messages.

How about we clarify the "Projects" forum and or make a sub-forum and call it "Communities"?

I agree with the others that have suggested fan sites.

This is the perfect opportunity for fan site and fan forums. If there is a community in your sim, or even a community that crosses sim borders (why does it have to stay in a sim?) you could (and maybe should) set up a forum and website for discussions.

- Yahoo groups is free and trivially easy to setup and maintain. It offers calendar with alerts, forums (I think) and an email group for discussion.

- Most ISPs come with at least 10 or 20mb of space, and there are several free forums out there. You should check www.sourceforge.com which has a lot of free projects. I use phpbb on a couple of my sites and find it works good.
Beware any bandwith cap, my popular forum regularly passes 10gb a month used bandwith, and its no where as popular as SL forums.

So really there are lots of easy and cheap methods out there to get a forum going or fansite going for your group. Linden Lab even offers a fan site kit somewhere if I recall correctly.

What might be nice is a way to submit fan sites to LL for placement on a Links page or something of the SL site.

Themed communities have their own forums. We have one in americana, and jesus, dont you know anyone can make a forum or mailing list in 5 minutes? Just use groups.yahoo.com or groups.msn.com or whatever you prefer

Howdy!

I have an idea, and I'm just going to throw this out there. I have had some extensive experience running forums of various kinds all the way back to BBS in the days before the web.

I think that SL could definitely benefit by having a set of forums dedicated to individual sims. Zana's idea is sensational.

However, Grim has a good point - we don't want to have to weed through these forums here trying to find whatever we're interested in. It is not practical to combine individual sim forums with the forums here.

With that in mind, I hopped on over to Ezboard and created a base-model discussion forum, centered around Zana's idea. Right now it's in a very primitive format, but I expect folks will help me change that.

A few important things to note about this way of creating forums:

1. It doesn't eat up LL bandwidth.

2. We control it, LL doesn't.

3. We can customize it any way we like - the possibilities are near endless.

4. We can expand it however we like.

5. Yahoo and MSN groups are messy and filled to the brim with ads, and they cannot cater to more than one thread at a time without becoming confusing. Ezboard works more like what we're already used to here.

I'm looking for feedback on the idea. This could potentially be very good for the community on the whole. However, I'm not exactly interested in moderating the thing. I don't mind doing some basic administration, but I would be looking for others to actively run it.

I'm thinking folks could choose their own representatives to help run the thing. Understand, we don't need any power trips, so we'd want to staff people in there who we all know are fair and just.

So what do you think?

The ball is rolling:

http://pub219.ezboard.com/bsecondlifesims

Thanks for your consideration,

-J

This is an interesting idea, but it fell flat where Gray is concerned. Kazenojin had a forum at zingbangboom.com which was used by maybe 2 or 3 of the group members, for a couple of weeks. When I post group news to the forum my intent is to reach the widest possible SL audience. As far as private group messages are concerned, using the IW IM system seems to work the best.