Why Is Linden Shutting Down Forums?

General was closed because it became a major Flame fest....and LL wouldn't put the resources into proper moderation!

Linden Answers became a "whinefest" and "verbally abusive" because LL wouldn't put the resources into answering the questions asked.

They say that they became "unscalable" which in my opinion is complete BS. It only fell behind because they did not assign anyone to answer them and didn't make it a mandatory part of their job. Linden Answers was an incredibly useful and effective method of getting answers from LL when Torley was answering a couple pages of questions a day. Had LL put a little of the $$ they are making from selling $L into paying the salary of 2 or 3 people to answer questions then it would have been completely scalable.

The forums that were closed did show a rather negative view of LL because of the lack of answers not the questions and issues people posted. LL resorted to giving stock "contact support" answers rather than finding the answers required or just being honest.

They said that they want to be with the times by using a blog rather than a forum but as we all know there is no way to ask a question about a topic that isn't a blog entry, and furthermore they turn off comments to entries that might have comments made that would pose a negative light. Nobody responds to the blogs, but yet they have the time to remove off topic or inflamitory posts.

Now they have included a new "feature" in-game where when you search for a person it no longer shows in the list whether they are online or not and say that it is to reduce the load on the database. This effectively makes it tedious if not impossible to find online lindens. Yet another closed avenue of communication.

Now the Forums cannot be viewed by non-residents, and cannot be posted to unless payment info is on file while the blog can be seen by anyone, so it seems to me that the forums would be a better avenue for people to vent rather than the forums.

Fact is that LL doesn't care what we need, what we say, or what we want and I challenge them to prove that they do...

To put things bluntly, look at it this way.

Help and Support Ingame: Ran by other players that don't work for LL

and now...

Help and Support Offline: Ran by...other players...that don't work for LL...aw, son of a bitch...

"Resident Answers" my ass. God damnit, LL, grow some balls and get on here. Answer these questions and stop trying to make yourself look better so you can get money while we struggle through.

Ostensibly they removed seeing whether people are online to reduce load on the database. (Load they caused in the first place by making it easier to get into SL than it is to get into virtually anywhere else online.)

But it's got to be the worst pain-in-the-butt intended change I've ever seen.

It is just ghastly not to know if people are online or not. I really do hate it. (Among other things, it means that whenever you have to IM them, you sound like a fool.)

It also has the side benefit (secondary, though, I honestly believe) of hiding Lindens from immediate view. As well as hiding those individual residents who have campaigned long and hard to be hidden from view. All that is lacking now is for the system to actually lie and say they are offline when they aren't - so that if you send them an IM, it will tell you they aren't there.

As for the closing of the forums, I agree with Musicteacher and most of what has been said along those lines. It is true that other forums manage perfectly well, by actually hiring employees to moderate them, rather than hoping employees might volunteer to do it and not become too depressed about it. Remember, at LL no one ever tells you what to do.

On the other hand, I'm also glad to see them gone, the way they were run. Because if you weren't here back when discussion and the other forums were open, you missed the open TOS-breaking tarring and feathing of certain individuals by other individuals, which was allowed depending who on the individuals involved were, and if the person talked back, he/she is the one who got disciplined.

I'm perfectly glad that's not happening any more.

coco

I miss General & Sandbox forums

I miss the goofy polls & posts.

I miss the whining & bitching! It was like reading a "cat fight" between 2 drunken bar flies. Amusing at times too.

And I miss the goofy links to oddball stuff on the web.

So much to see, so little time in the world to see it.

It is not true that the ability to see other people's online status has been removed.

We have been given the option of determining whether to have our online status visible only to people on our friends list, or visible to everyone.

On the Preferences, Communication tab, the first option at the top is a checkbox labeled "Make my online status visible only to my Friends".

If you check that box, only your friends can see your online status.

If you don't check that box, everyone can see your online status.

I don't have the "Make my online status visible only to my Friends" box checked. Thus, everyone can see my online status in my profile. Here is where it appears:


You can also see the online status of fellow group members displayed in the Group Information dialog that appears when you right click your av, select groups, highlight a group and click Info; and you can see fellow group member's online status if you use the group tab in the search dialog to find a group that you are in.

The aspect of "online status display" that was removed was the ability to limit name search results to only those online or to do a search on a partial name and get results that showed online status for every name the search returned all at once.

Ok, good! Thank you for clearing that up for me, Suezanne. I'll check it out tonight. I've been looking on the left side, where it used to be.

coco

Pretend for a minute that you run a coffee shop.

You sell coffee and snacks, that's your only revenue.


The customers like to hang out and talk about all sorts of things and have meetings in your shop... so, out of respect for that, you hang a big bulletin board up so that your customers can put up fliers, find people with common interests, announce gatherings, trade things, ask questions and such.

Then your bulletin boards start filling up with:

Frankly, cost + no revenue + abuse&hassle = Loss of a free service.


Be glad that any forums remain open at all.

But if those notes on the bulleton board are pointing out that the coffee is cold and the donuts are stale and the owner of the coffee shop won't do anything to change that then why would the owner get upset and take the board away? Because the patrons were bad mouthing him? Or could it be because the future patrons might see the complaints that were not addressed by the one who put the board up in the first place?

By the way..........why would someone put a bulletin board up if not to gain information? Well as a public service I suppose..........so I guess Linden Labs only open the forums as a public service. Guess I misunderstood. LOL

Haven't you noticed that nearly every place that has a "suggestion box" usually only have a narrow slot on the top and a lock to prevent anyone but the owner for seeing the contents?

If chairs in my cafe were being taken up by mouthy non-paying people who were enjoying expressing themselves at my expense.... I'd take action too, whether they were right or not.

Besides, the bulletin board is so deep in old messages and flames now that the fire marshal has condemned it as a fire hazard.

I'd pull the damned thing down too.

I appreciate the forums because I have gotten to talk to people I wouldn't have else wise seen or even talked to in world.
I have got read and learn things I wouldn't have known about elsewhere.
Yes there is annoying people, nasty and rude people who write rude and nasty comments but that exist every where who think this game should only be for those who spend hundreds and thousand of dollars.
But that type of person exist every where.
I hope they don't close all the forums. It only real way to communicate.
The third party forums, been there no one really is there, no one really post much and personally I find it its hard to use, it even harder to get your password if you lose it.

Not to mention that it was getting harder to actually FIND the useful gems of information. Geeze, it wasn't just the complaints about LL either. Those were roughly 1/5th the problem. The rest was just utterly silly arguments that should have died with the first post or had been locked within three.

Now, if they had learned to properly use the shovel for both digging and hitting things over the head, the forums might still have been around It would have been a lot quieter if the hitting over heads had happened a lot more! And I could have used the coma time to get in some texture making

I believe most of the forum comments....both negative and positive are made by paying customers. The analogy of a bunch of people sitting around and not paying is way off base.

I pay Linden Labs money.........not thousands but it is hundreds a year. And if I have no way to communicate with the people I'm paying money to then I begin to wonder why I continue to pay. And just so you know........I'm a very patient person. But patience quickly wanes when I feel I'm ingnored. And with the forums being closed with nothing to replace them I'm beginning to get to end of my patience. I think most are like me.

If...........one big IF..........Linden Labs had a reasonable support system then I might agree about the bitching and moaning and groaning by the few who will always gripe. I'm not one to gripe just to gripe. I have problems with the lack of support......big problems. And there appears to be no change on the horizon to remedy that. So I gripe. I gripe with the hopes someone who might be able to solve this problem I have will read and actually think about what I'm saying. Commications is a very vital key to customer satisfaction.........and customer satisfaction is key to survival for any business. And Linden Labs is a business.

That doesn't happen here. I'm not the only one who has this very same problem.......just read the archives. Close another avenue for a hope of commications to "solve' the problem? That just reinforces the problem.

I'm waiting for one of two things to come about: Linden Labs get it together. Or another "Linden Labs" to open up for business ("Linden Labs" meaning another group of developers). I would leave in a heartbeat today..........but I'm waiting with high hopes right now. But those high hopes are falling.........a matter of time for me. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

You're missing the point entirely, Peggy. NONE of the forums here were intended as an avenue for customer service or support. Not a single one. Jopsy was spot on in his analogy a few posts back.

You folks who have big complaints, and I don't mean to say your complaints are without value, I'm sure they are, tend to exploit every open forum you happen upon to voice your gripes and bitches. While those gripes and bitches may be valid, your further gripes and bitches about Linden Lab closing down forums that you have abused and exploited with your gripes and bitches only adds fuel to the fire. (calls run-on-sentence-police on self)

It is apparent that the very people who are now bitching about forums being shut down are the people who are causing the forums to be shut down in the first place.

I can't counsel you as to where or who or how you should address your complaints about customer service provided or not provided by Linden Lab, but I can assure you that these forums are not the appropriate place, and it is this very practice that is causing them to be shut down.

Edited to add the following:
Until there is a forum specifically entitled: "Post your gripes and bitches to Linden Lab here", stop using the general forums and blog comments to post your gripes and bitches. They don't belong there, whether or not you believe you have a right to post them there. They just don't.

And if Linden Labs would answer support questions that were sent to the "proper" place for such customer support you would never hear me here bitching. That's the problem.

So YOU entirely missed my point. The conclusion is simple............one avenue of communications that at least was visible is gone. And it's not because of the gripes and sometimes out and out flaming. It's because Linden Labs has no customer support. None. The forums were a place to shout to them that they needed customer support. They appear to be ignoring that fact...........and to stop hearing our shouts the silenced us.

Emails are so easy to delete. Voice mails are so easy to "overlook". Snail mail is easy to pile up. Where does one turn for support? No one has answered that for me.............all the "avenues" Linden Labs has provided don't work. And I can see no valid reason why they shouldn't work........except that LL doesn't want Customer Support.

No, they weren't. That's my point, that YOU missed yet again. That you exploit them in that way is one thing. That they were not provided for that purpose is another thing. You cannot justify your misuse of the forums and blog comments by your dissatisfaction with "customer service". You just can't. So please, stop it.

Ok, look...if Second Life was completely free and noone ever paid a thing for it, I could understand a lack of tech support, even if it was ran by one person and wasn't dependant on Linden Labs to run.

However, look at our in-game support. Who runs it? Other players that don't know any more about a problem in SL than we do, and if they do its because someone asked before us and they just know. That's not tech support, thats "phone a friend".

Linden Labs should have hired people to weed through the mess and bullshit. Yes, if a coffee shop keeps getting complains about their donuts and coffee being bad, thats no excuse for them to tell people they can no longer complain and they have to pay for the bad product. However, even so, a place that doesn't give customer support normally gets complaints. And the place cant just say "you can no longer ever talk about our problems again" or "go tell that guy if you don't like the bad coffee, he just bought some bad coffee too".

Get real people at Linden Labs working on tech support is NEEDED. What happens if you sweep a million things under the rug? You get a rug that stands about 10 feet high and can no longer contain the problem. And throwing said rug out the door with the dust doesn't help.

Linden Labs, GET YOUR ASS IN GEAR AND GIVE SOME DAMN SUPPORT. I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO HEAR FROM ANOTHER PERSON THAT DOESN"T WORK FOR YOU WHAT YOU ARE DOING WRONG!

I'll stop it..........yes sir. As you wish, your majesty LOL.

We are never going agree.......you like it without support, I don't. You believe support is nothing but a waste of time, I don't. You miss my point and I miss yours.

But watch Linden Labs fall like AOL did and whine about the why. I'm done bitching. I'm too busy looking for alternatives. LOL

Take care.

Wow, what a brilliant analogy. LL is a coffee shop. It's just that simple.

How does one express sarcasm over the internet, again?

I won't argue the point that LL is clearly having trouble keeping up with their customer support issues.

LL is a small company of less than 200 trying to keep happy what I think is probably around 200,000 regular customers. (the other million that have been active in the last 60 days I'm fairly confident are first-timers/short-timers/tourists and alts)

So, that's a ratio of worse than 1000 customers per employee.

Can one librarian manage a library with 1000 people in it? Most of those people are self sufficient:
* some can return books on their own, or
* just sit and read quietly without help.
* But someone brought a dog in with them... and
* someone else has a question about their tax form... and
* someone else noticed that there's a couple having sex in the self-help section, shouldn't someone stop that? and
* some minors are in the porn section? and
* why haven't all these returns been shelved yet? and
* why do you have the newspapers over here instead of over there? and
* why is this line taking so long for me to check out my book...


We are too many, paying too little to too few for them to keep up with our demands... justified or, more likely, not.

*I* would rather not pay more and am, for now, happy with the level of support that I get.

How much more are you willing to pay for better support?

No no.. you got it wrong... SecondLife is the COFFEE...

Sheesh, come up with a simple analogy and sarcastic types get it all wrong.

*yawn*.

That the best you got?

There is no question in my mind that Linden labs is closing Forums because of negative comments. It's much easier to hide the truth by sending all comments to the black hole of "support@secondlife. I have not received one response from my inquiries for support.

And, if anyone thinks that the reason is that Linden Labs is short of funds, they haven't been following the land sales at all. They can't even keep up with the demand for new sims. So, they are now selling off regions of nothing but water. Water that should be protected for the use of all SL members. Just look at the new regions on the South Continent. Beautiful waterfront regions that should border protected bodies of water. But no, all the water in between the regions is being auctioned off, lowering the existing waterfront property values. Property that SL members have paid a premium for, because they were on protected Linden water. Off shore water around the continents is also being sold off, making it impossible to navigate the waterways in a in a boat. Whether you own land or not, you should demand that Linden labs keeps the waterways in SL protected and accessable to all.

Cross posting to 12 forums will be more effective at getting yourself banned than it will be at resolving your issue.

your verbage seems in the wrong tense - they SHUT down those forums - a Long time ago. Becuase they no longer wished to moderate the accompanying drama.

I read you post and wondered if they were shutting down more forums than the ones previous. It doesnt seem so.

of course someone told me once the following adage -

"What is there to do in SL anyway?"
=>"Drama"


There was far more personal conflict on those forums directed resident to resident - than was ever directed at LL.

LL , other than sometimes buggy releases and sometimes difficult to understand choices - was usually fairly well received. The most angry complaints came when SL was DOWN - which just goes to prove they must have been doing something right since peopel wanted SL up. lol

I miss those forums they were good - was a generally good group of people who were involved in them. But this is old news. Seriously.

Umm, no, those weren't protected waterways. They were blank voids of nothingness that just looked like water to our mortal eyes. Kinda like when God created the Earth. But there weren't people here then to see it.