No Forum? Ok, how do we.....

Alight, I looked over the blog. Even listened to Torley's "How to use this blog" tutorial. [edit] After further looking through the blog....what a load of crud. The information might be there, but it's far easier to locate in a forum base. Forum; Catagories all listed on one page, then all titles listed on one page. Blog; only last posted blogs seen until you page through several pages and links. This may make sense eventually, but for now, and for non-netsurfers, it is a nightmare. LL should remember that not all of the community are computer engineers. Quite frankly, I doubt I'll ever use the LL site again if they close the forums. [/edit]


But what about the community getting information to Linden Lab, or our fellow residents?

Points:

-SLLM. How are we to request assistance without this forum?

-Answers. Like this question, how are we to ask for information from Linden Lab?

-General. A lot of information is passed her between Residents, speciffically information usefull to new Residents. I agree, there is a lot of junk there as well, but that will always be with large amounts of people. I have personally recieved help from this forum I caould never have gotten anywhere else. Not even Linden Lab knows the world of Second Life as well as some of the long time Residents.

These are just 3 of my personal concerns off the top of my head. I'm sure others will have more concerns.

So how are we to get information to Linden Lab, and how are we to get, and recieve, information from our fellow Residents?

And no, a 3rd party site is not an acceptable answer. Not unless SL is going to pick one and offically link to it from the main site as they do with the current one. A centralised communication system is needed.

A blog is not communication. A blog is information. Communication is termed by trading information. Blogs are one way for the most part. We Residents can post replies, but we can not actually begin communication as we do in the forums.

I'm not saying to keep the forums, but the factor of communication needs to be addressed, and needs to be done BEFORE the ending of the current system.

As much as it may pain to do, I would reccomend asigning a Linden(s) to make a stickified post in General to get an idea of concerns and needs of the community. Not jsut to psot once, but to reply and discuss throughout the posts to follow. I say for such in General so that we can give feedback. Hopefully in a mature manor *crosses fingers* so that all aspects can be worked out for the good of the community and the good of Linden Lab before the communication we have is lost.

We ain't perfect, but we do talk. Lets work together an make it better.

~Jessy

Sure, good points.

In brief, SLLM is open-ended and as Guy is gracious proprietor, I'm sure he'll be keeping an eye on how things scale in the long-term. No plans to close SLLM.

SL Answers in its current state is unscalable--the unanswered questions are adding up and I'm replying where I can (like now), and a lot of the common threads on here are good to post about on the blog as they're relevant to the community at large and shouldn't be buried.

The blog isn't meant to replace the forums, but as a *NEW* channel of communication. Certainly, some things are more conductive to it, some not--we also have an email subscription option available to make things even easier:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/08/11/subscribe-to-the-official-linden-blog-by-email/

And you know what? A lot of the important things, they come to me in my email box or inworld! I get TONS and TONS. Never ever any shortage of feedback, no matter where I look, and I certainly hear a lot of it. Right this very moment, I've got well over 100 different Resident Experience issues to check out. I hope to get to those, make things better--together, like you said!

There's a lot that'll happen that hasn't become clear yet but we're going to continue communicating about what comes in place to make stuff easier for you.