Second Life Answers went live.

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/05/28/check-out-second-life-answers-now-in-beta

What do you think of it? It looks really sterile and competitive and not social to me. I hope there will still be a real forum.

It's interesting that all of the very basic newbie-like questions so far have been asked by avatars who have been in SL two years or more.

LOL, I think those are mentors who seeded it with questions.

I hope like heck this is not the final step in getting rid of the forums.

If it's using the same search engine as the rest of the new blog software, it's doomed.

Too soon to tell. Right now it looks dreadful because it's full of fake questions, but that was inevitable: it has to have some answers from the start or nobody would try it.

I'm sure that if it comes to that, we can go in and junk up the joint and make it feel like home. It's just not giving me that graffiti urge yet.

The experience for new people to SL can be extremely rough - as I can attest, it takes a lot of effort, luck, and know how just to figure out the most basic aspects of this place.
- it then gets very easy to forget how hard it was.

Hopefully this thing will just become a new user resource and -NOT- phase out this forum, because I rather like having a forum around to read and converse on when at a location where I can't really log into a 'video game' (and like it or not, anyone seeing SL on your screen who is not part of SL is going to assume its a game, and you'll be very hard pressed to explain its anything else).

It's, um... interesting. Maybe it's me, but I did not find it very intuitive.

So I guess they have to scratch the "So simple, even a child can use it" ad campaign?

A child could do it!

It seems confusing to me. Not well thought out.

When you ask a question, the text entry box is at the right side of the screen, and looks a great deal like it's cut off on the right.

I don't see a way to see a list of all questions sorted by date regardless of topic, such as one can get from the "New Posts" link in this vBulletin forum.

The tabs are weird.

There's a search box at the top right that says "Search Blogs", which doesn't seem appropriate if you are wanting to search the questions and answers. There is an automatic search if you type in the "Search Blogs" input field, which does search the questions and answers, along with old blog posts and such.

It doesn't do an automatic search of existing questions and answers as you are typing your question, like the getsupport.com site, unfortunately.

My initial reaction is disappointment with the way the system works. Of course, I've only played with it a few minutes.

It might be an effective way to get questions answered even if I don't like it to the point where I don't feel like answering questions there. The point is not to provide a pleasant pastime for question askers and answerers, it's to increase user retention by easing and speeding the process of getting questions answered.

I don't see any mention of a way to ask a question and read an answer while inworld, which seems a shame.

I wished LL had selected a different software system for their entire web site. The Jive (formerly Clearspace?) stuff just doesn't make it for me.

Well, let's give it a good try.

They already tried "So easy, even a caveman can do it". The lizard sued.

Yeah, but then the cave men hunted him down and ate him.

ick, very hard to read the grey on white and I agree its way to impersonal, it would be the last place I would send someone for help.

Has anyone asked "Is sex in SL cheating?" yet?

hehehehehe

"Why, this is so simple a five-year-old child could understand it! ... Go find me a five-year-old child; I can't make heads or tails of it."

(Quote stolen from Groucho Marx.)

I tried to figure out how to answer a poll, but couldn't.

Maybe we should create alts and start posting "college surveys"

Brenda's signature is funny.

Are we still unable to add our "forum avatars" to the new jive-turkey sl site?

I just tried to get to the Second Life Answers site by putting "second life answers" in to Google and clicking on a link to a blog post.

The above error message was the result.

I guess this problem must not affect many people, or there'd be more of a stink made about it.

It affects me on multiple computers, using different browsers, and has done so since the new web site appeared.

I don't know that this will affect the Answers site, but it seems like there's a fair chance it will.

https://blogs.secondlife.com
https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/05/28/check-out-second-life-answers-now-in-beta

And yes, after finding the url, I see that the answers site,

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/answers

gives the same error message.

Apparently LL hasn't yet chosen to support the use of the urls "answers.secondlife.com" or "secondlife.com/answers". To get to Answers, you have to connect Q&A with blogs, and to search the Q&A, you have to use a search field labeled "Search Blogs".

There's really nothing better for asking and answering questions than a vBulletin forum or a similar one such as phpBB or other such "normal, old fashioned looking" forum software, not that I've seen.

Oh well, likes and dislikes are a moot point now.

Blog comments are still open, you may want to post this there. LL has said that they plan on tuning it.

Same thing if you find the color scheme difficult - I'm sure that's easy to change.
.

Incidently, I think Lexie Linden may just have indirectly answered-by-omission the question of whether they plan to close the forums now, on the blog comments.

In order to access the blog when this error message starts appearing I have to clear all cookies for "secondlife", which means logging back in to the forums, the wiki, the jira, and the blog site.

This is not how a well designed web site works. There aren't any other sites that I ever visit that fail in this manner. It's annoying to me that "the upcoming 3D internet" fails at tasks that are dealt with by every other web site I visit. uWorld and Novoking's sites are easier to figure out and operate and I don't speak the language they are written in. Pffft!

Based on the results of the jira about the blog problems, I doubt there will be much action about it. LL didn't believe it was really a problem, last time I checked.

I don't suppose there is an RSS feed for incoming questions, is there?

And you have to manually mark your post as a question. What were they thinking about when designing this site?

I'm getting irked, well, actually I'm already aggravated, I suppose I should leave it alone.