Please don't close the forums!

Please don't! It just doesn't feel right. It feels like Linden Lab doesn't want our input anymore.



What's the real reason for the closure? Is it really just a matter of high maintenance, or is Linden Lab worried that the forums present a poor public image of Linden Lab as a company? Have LL investors complained that "something should be done?"

Who made the decision? Was it down to a single person or did LL decide as a company?

Why not keep the builders, scripters and commercial forums?

Will the SL website link to third party forums under COMMUNITY, with a disclaimer that LL is not responsible for content of third party sites?

I believe the decision is a consensus between the Community Relations group who are in charge of the content of the forums, and the Operations group who are in charge of maintaining the forum servers and database. From LL's perspective technical and public relations management of a central forums is just not going to scale well as the SL resident base continues to grow.

A good data point for that conclusion is the evolution of this SL Answers forum. I think the sheer number of questions coming in and the delicacy and tact that many of the questions must be addressed has discouraged the general LL developer pool from participating. To read 40 new questions a day but only have time to answer one or two is an excercise in frustration, and it is easy to escape in the abundance of work we all have on our plate. Meanwhile, Torley has been doing a fantastic job at fielding most of the questions, and forwarding others on to the specialists who know more, but people with Torley's qualities are rare and hard to come by -- I've often worried that we wouldn't be able to find enough Torleys to keep the forums afloat in the future.

I think LL is still very interested in Resident input. The central blog is a new communication channel that might help keep the input coming (the blog entries can support comments), and I think there are other channels that are in the works. I would certainly miss the opportunity to engage in forums as 'Andrew Linden', so if we do close down some of the central forums I'll probably apply for an account on a popular 3rd party forum and participate there as time allows, or maybe open my own blog someday.

Builders, scripters, and commercial forums are actually good examples for subjects that might be better handled by focused 3rd party sites. There are already a great many forums on the web for birds-of-a-feather interests that work well.

I don't know about the Web group's plans for links to popular 3rd party sites under the Community section of secondlife.com, but I would expect that to be a helpful page to put up.