forum needs better organization

What will become of the Preview 1.9.1 forum when SL 1.9.1 is released? If it will go in the archive, it should be, along with the archived "Preview for SL 1.9" forum. As it is now, the archive needs better organization. The groups are in a separate group archive but the "Preview for SL 1.9" forum is outside of it, yet still in the main archive list--it's a bit confusing.

Perhaps the archived groups should go on the main forum list under "Forum Archive" (though just "Archive" is sufficient since it's obviously a forum) as a subcategory of "Groups". "Hotline Archive" should be moved out to the main "Forum Archive" list, too, and have its replies/views counts correct instead of 0 for both (and "never" for "last post".

Why are the remaining 12,449 threads mindlessly clumped together in the root "Archive" forum (see how this is confusing with the "Forum Archive" category name)? They should be in the same forum name under the archive category.

The non-archived forums aren't categorized well, or alphabetized. The discussion forums are misleading since some Linden forums are discussion forums too. The subforums off the main forum list are annoying, too (except for the "Group Life" category). It isn't apparent a particular forum HAS subforums; if it does it should be a category, not a forum.

This:

Linden Forums

1. Announcements
   
2. Known Issues
   
3. References & Policies
   1. Second Life Release Notes
   
   
4. Feature Feedback
   1. Zoning/Covenants/Group Empowering
      
   2. Preview 1.9.1
   
   
5. Second Life Answers
   
6. SLLM: Second Life Land Management
   
7. Press Opportunities
   

...could be:

Linden Forums

1. Announcements
   
2. Feature Feedback
   
3. Known Issues
   
4. Press Opportunities
   
5. Preview 1.9.1
   
6. References & Policies
   
7. Second Life Answers
   
8. Second Life Release Notes
   
9. SLLM: Second Life Land Management
   
10. Zoning/Covenants/Group Empowering
    

...or otherwise separated into subcategories.

The "Discussion Forums" category is, perhaps, the worst organized category. Similar forums should be grouped together apart from dissimilar ones:

1. General
   
   
2. Content Creation
   1. Animations
      
   2. Building
      
   3. Design and Textures
      
   4. Gallery
      
   5. Movies & Machinima
      
   6. Scripting Library
      
   7. Scripting Tips
      
   
   
   
3. Land and the Economy
   
   
4. Technical
   1. Current Version Feature Feedback
      
   2. Feature Suggestions
      
   3. Linux Client Alpha Testers
      
   4. Technical Issues
      
   
   
   
5. Off-Topic
   
   
6. Social
   1. Event Discussion
      
   2. Meet-ups and Real Life Events
      
   3. Notices and Well Wishes
      
   4. SL In-world Political Science
      
   5. SL Volunteers & Education
      
   
   

The "International" and "Classifieds" categories don't even list all the forums on the main list.

Edit: Nevermind, too sleepy right now. Can't delete post.

There are some interesting ideas here. I'd like to hear what other Resis think too--it could be a good launchboard for future changes, together we could shape it more effectively.

Eep, I am wondering for your reasoning why:

1. General isn't in Social?
   
2. Why "Zoning/Covenants/Group Empowering" is a top-level Linden forum and not within "Feature Feedback"?
   
3. Where you think "Mac Discussion" and "Mac Universal Binary Alpha" should go (likely under "Technical"?), as I didn't see them listed.
   

Looking forward to more feedback and discussion on this.

Because it can be for anything so it shouldn't be in a subcategory (like "Offtopic".

Yea, I didn't spend much time on the Linden forums but it could be under a "Feature Feedback" subcategory.

I'd put them in a separate "Mac" subcategory or "Mac Discussion" under the main "Discussion Forums" category and "Mac Universal Binary Alpha" under "Technical".

The point is to have most of the forums visible from the main forum category list to reduce the amount of clicks to get to subcategories/-forums since there's no indication of them on the main list.

1. Get rid of the "Community:" part of the forum title. It adds nothing and it obscures the Most Significant Bit of the title on tabs and RSS aggregators and such. I'd be even happier if you didn't even spell out "Second Life" (call it "SL Forums".

2. KISS - Anything with more than one level of forums below the major categories is probably too complicated; the interface becomes frustrating with the use of sub-forums and sub-sub-forums. Given the number of forums here (also a problem), it may not be easy to eliminate that entirely. It can, however, be mitigated a bit.

- "Wider is better" - Some of the forums that exist could stand to be rolled into a larger forum. They aren't used often enough to justify their existence (Zoning, for example, hasn't had a new post in over a month, and only three since the beginning of March, and there are lots of features that have seen far more discussion but don't get a forum to themselves). Retaining these forums clutters the list and attenuates the audience (leading to users and even Lindens posting in General just to reach as many people as possible). Because post topics are not always so narrow and threads sometimes go in new directions, excessively narrow forums sometimes make it harder, not easier, to decide where something belongs, and it promotes conflicts between the intent of the author and the interpretation of the moderators.

- For reorganization, I don't see a good reason to retain Discussion Forums as a monolithic category, at least not under that uselessly vague and redundant name. (Isn't discussion the purpose of most forums?) It isn't even used very consistently. For example, there's a "Current Version feedback" in Discussion, but "Feature Feedback" (and its subfora) falls under Linden Forums. You could make a case for feedback forums being one or the other, but it's hard to see how one version of feedback can be Discussion and the other something else.

In any case, I'd advise moving some of the categories Eep suggested up to the top level. Even a rough pass at the forums with that could result in something like this (note that the italicized titles are categories ala "Discussion Forums", not forums themselves, and that there should be as few subforums below the this list as we can get away with):

SL Forums

1. Linden Info
   1. Announcements - This now gets the announcement part of Press Opportunities as well. The remaining part of that forum can go somewhere under Feedback (if it even remains relevant post-NWN).
      
   2. Release Notes and Known Issues (You could justify putting this under Technical instead)
      
   3. Reference and Policies
      
   4. SL Answers - This needs to be "Original Poster can reply", at least, or you need to start cracking down on posts like My question, Part MCLXVII. The current situation seems very much like trying to have your cake and eat it, too.
      
   5. SL Land Management
   
   
   
2. Resident Conversation
   1. Bulletin Board - Calling it "Notices and Well Wishes" seems a bit counter-intuitive, given that half the threads there contradict the latter part of the name, and the first part is so loose a term that it covers a large portion of the threads that get posted elsewhere, at least according to the resmods.
      
   2. General Topic/Wide Interest - Renamed to be clear, since that's how it's actually used.
      
   3. Gallery
      
   4. Real Life Meetings
      
   5. The Capitalist Self-Aggrandizement/Chicken Little Hour^H^H^H^H^HLand and Economy
      
   6. SL Political Science
      
   7. Posts What Are Not Even Vaguely On Topic
   
   
   
3. Content Creation
   1. Animations
      
   2. Building
      
   3. Design and Textures
      
   4. SL Events
      
   5. SL Games
      
   6. Fansites and External Content
      
   7. Movies & Machinima
      
   8. Scripting - Never really was clear on the point of having a separate Library forum, honestly
   
   
   
4. Feedback
   1. Feature Suggestions
      
   2. Preview X.Y.Z
      
   3. Upcoming Features - Zoning forum gets merged in here
      
   4. Current Version
   
   
   
5. Technical
   1. Linux
      
   2. Macintosh - Mac Discussion and Mac Universal Binary become one thing
      
   3. Windows
   
   
   
6. Volunteers
   1. Greeters
      
   2. Live Help
      
   3. Mentors
      
   4. Resmods
      
   5. Tutors and Classes - Formerly "SL Instructors and Educators" (which seems misleading)
   
   
   
7. International - At least two of the Linden subforums here haven't had posts since last August...
   1. German
      
   2. Japanese
      
   3. Korean
      
   4. Gorean
      
   5. Fur...ean
      
   6. Etc.
      
   7. No, I'm not serious about Gorean and Furean.
   
   
   
8. Classifieds
   1. Basically all the junk that is presently under Classifieds goes here. I put Fansites elsewhere, on the grounds that you could see it as content creation, but whatever.
      
   2. "Land sales and Rentals" and "Property Sales and Rentals" seem a bit redundant and perhaps should be merged into one thing.
   
   
   
9. Group Forums - I'm not even going to look in here.
   
   
10. Archives - As per current Archives or however you want to reorganize them
    

Here are a few new forums we could add:

1. The Black Hole - Anyone whose posts repeatedly cause threads to be moved to this category is permanently banned from the rest of the forums. And SL. And RL.
   1. zOMGDrama! - The forum for people who seem determined to rant and rave, usually with levels of propriety, tact, or simple politeness that remain undetectable to modern science.
      
   2. The Windmill-tilting Forum (aka "SL Age Play"
      
   3. u wont spel rite or pucnuation frum also it is teh k3wl3st!!1!
      
   4. Under the Bridge - The forum where trolls get sent
   
   

My friend Elspeth has suggested the following additions:

1. Pickup Forum
   1. men seeking women
      
   2. women seeking men
      
   3. men seeking men
      
   4. women seeking women
      
   5. men seeking men who are pretending to be women
      
   6. women seeking men who are pretending to be women
      
   7. men seeking men who are pretending to be men
      
   8. men and women seeking men and women pretending to be animals
      
   9. animals seeking men
      
   10. animals seeking prims
       
   11. prims seeking sanctuary
       
   12. other
   
   

Or that the Forums should simply be divided into:

1. About SL
   
2. Not about SL
   
3. Oh, God, will you STFU already?
   

But I pointed out that the latter would probably get the most traffic.

Dyne, your suggestion looks a lot like the organization over at Notebook Forums (though they have general subforums for each vendor, which makes sense). If you're curious hit the 'Kind Healer' link in my sig and its on the sidebar.

Formats like that should work very well in something as diverse as SL - and by 'diverse' I'm saying that though most everything here is about SL in some way, it allows discussion to be clearly delineated.

:link:

ok

Thanks, Torley; it does make the forums easier to navigate now.
I'd keep the forums named "Second Life Forums" so it looks more professional.

The "Linden Forums" still need some work:

1. "Second Life Land Management" - Is it really necessary to acronymize this as "SLLM" (and then put the acronym in front)? Who actually uses it? Is it THAT popular that it needs an acronym (and in the main forum list, no less)?
   
2. "References & Policies" still has "Second Life Release Notes" under it which is duplicated in the main list. I'd remove the subforum one.
   
3. What order are they in? I'd go with alphabetical.

"Resident Forums", while better, still need some tweaking:

1. "Technical Talk" (a bit redundant with "Talk", eh? Obviously, a forum implies talk, or communication...) - I'd alphabetize the list--or at least after the "Technical Issues" forum so at least the Mac forums are grouped together instead of being split by the Linux forum.
   
2. "Classifieds" - not all forums are listed and there's no indication of subforums; if the bulletin board software can't indicate this, it should be mentioned in the parent category/forum ("New Products", etc). The rentals and wanted forums could be grouped separately:
   1. Rentals
      1. Land
         
      2. Property
         
      
      
   2. Wanted
      1. Employment
         
      2. Products
         
      
      
   
   
3. "Forum Archive" (just "Archive" would suffice) - "Hotline" shouldn't be under "Archived Group Forum" since it's not a group. Oddly, "Archive" and "Archived Group Forums" list the same subforums except "Archive" also has posts--confusing.
   

I got a lot of feedback on the whole "Community: Second Life Forums" thing. The reasoning for making it very short that it eats up too much of the browser tag width--or sometimes, aggregator header--not letting even a glimmer of a thread's actual title be shown.

Expanded SLLM to the full name--that's a good point.

Re: Classifieds, vBulletin doesn't appear to have that much flexibility with differing depths for varying forum areas, but maybe those will be sorted out later.

I agree the forum archive part looks wonky. Hotline actually has posts in it dating back, they don't show in the active count for some reason. :\

We'll give this some time to gel and continue from there. Thanx for your suggestions.