Design the new Forums!!

LL is in the early stages of designing new forums, based on the same software used in the Blogs. For a few details: /327/52/323713/4.html#post2452376

OOOKAY! So, I have a new forum game for us. Let's develop a list of specifications for the new forums! YAY!

Start from the current Blog format. I'm thinking of things like:

> Navigation:
--- Need to be able to see n Most Recent Posts, forum- wide ("New Posts"
--- Need to be able to see one's own most recently posted to threads ("User CP"

> Screen Formats
--- For each individual post, moar text, less sidebars! The current blog format is not friendly to long posts.
--- Any screen displaying a bunch of threads to choose from needs to be condensed - it is more important to see a lot of threads at once than to see a lot of related material or navigation to choose from

> Control
--- Thread creator can lock it

Your ideas? I volunteer to boil down ideas into a Google doc to hand to the Lindens.

Absolutely NOT anything with a Blog-style interface or back-end design. Blogs are meant as a personal soapbox for one person (or a small group of people) to make statements, with minimal public feedback. They are NOT suitable in any way to an extended discussion among equals. Using a Blog as a two-way communication tool is like using a bullhorn in the hands of one person, or a small group, place of cell phones for each participant. If you don't have your own bullhorn, your voice isn't heard.

Everyone needs to be able to create new threads.

It has to support easily switching between flat and threaded views.

Both Flat and threaded mode need an "overview" state, where you can se teh poster's name, date and time stamp, and their subject line and the first line or two of their post, then can clic on individual posts to expand them.

Flat mode has to support a way to jump back to the post in the thread that the poster is replying to.

blogs to me are like threads on the internet forum..as my father would say..useless and teets on a bull

Both flat and threaded are useless when the number of posts grows, as can be seen in a couple of recent blog posts. If it can't be paged, it's useless.

/me would rather leave than use that blog software with any kind of regularity.

That software sucks and LL got ripped off if they paid money for it and it was supposed to be something other than Beta quality. It's a huge step backwards and I'm sick of this crap from LL.

"We're listening!!" Right..

We talked with Blue Linden yesterday and he seemed to say that they had pretty much settled on the blog format. We need to make it very clear that this will be the death knell of the SL Forums. As someone else said, blogs are soapboxes, not discussion areas.

They know that already. That is what they want.

You can see the software they are going to use in action - it is the new SL Answers area. Depending on the feature they activate and use, it can be useful, just will be a huge change from VBulletin.

No, not exactly, Koko. SL Answers is one application of the Jive platform, which LL recognizes is not appropriate for forums. Many businesses are using this platform for their forums, which actually do look a lot like VB forums -- for example, Intel. Here is the Intel's new "Processors" forum, using Jive's stuff:
http://communities.intel.com/community/tech/processors?view=discussions

Here is the page where you select which forum ("community" you want to view - the page includes their forums-wide "New Posts" section: http://communities.intel.com/main-threads.jspa This page is too busy for my tastes, but that's Intel's decision.

Understand, I'm not an advocate of using Jive's stuff here - I just happen to have been loosely following the company for a while, so know a bit about it.

Forums are not Jive's central mission, but you CAN create recognizable forums using it. I'm skeptical about one potential problem: SCALABILITY. I've looked at the boards of a few Jive customers, and I don't see anywhere near the traffic this forum sustains. Jive is a fairly new company, so I fear for the robustness and scalability of their complex platform, which supports many forms of social networking.
.

Didn't we already go thru an exercise of giving our input on what we wanted OUR forums to be like and didn't they listen just fine and dandy?

I don't think this will be the kiss of death yet, but it's getting closer in my opinion. I'm just glad I know a few RA oldtimers over at SLU. It will make the transition easier for me.

and a mute button. Nany is back in the AC thread and has just reminded me just how necessary that button is

*sighs* Hold out your glass, I'll pour.

If it's going to be subject to WEB-92 http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-982, which includes the

"Connection Interrupted The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again."

errors then it doesn't make too much difference what it's like.

The Intel forum linked to as a sample is extremely hard for me to read owing to tiny font size, choice of text color, and the completely asinine use of gradients and shading as background for text when the text characters and text background are of nearly equal intensity to start with.

So for starters I request solid colored text on a solid colored background, for all the text, not just the thread titles and post bodies, but on all buttons and other control elements.

Clicking on column headers should sort the data by the column value.

No animated smilies.

If you put a link that's too long to display on one line, the visible text should be an shortened version of the actual link text, but should not have a big stupid looking scroll bar appear, like it does in the Second Life Answers.

Users should have working forum avatars.

I'd like to suggest that users should be able to upload images, but LL can't be trusted to preserve them, so all things considered it's probably best that people depend on more reliable places to store there images.

Features should work, even when it's first released, unlike the poll mechanism in Second Life, and if they don't work, a Linden Lab staff member should take the few minutes necessary to reply to repeated comments about their failure.

Their should be a forum private message system.

Basically it should look and work exactly like this forum would if it were updated, and the search unshackled.

I wonder if this is what got Wagner James Au thinking that LL is working on a "social network" for SL users and speculating on Facebook and Myspace integration and so on?

I have used the Intel forums and I think some other forums using what was Clearspace software. The were ok for the tiny amount of use I made of them, purely for technical assistance.

Where would one get a complete but concise list of what features are available?

A web based "live chat" system operated by LL might get enough use to be of use; keep a 24 hours backlog of text, like systems I used years ago did. Have a channel or two for different purposes, such as technical help and friendly chatter. This lets you look back and see what the buzz is, but doesn't require preserving idle chat, transient squabbles, etc. forever. Folks who want more permanent asynchronous discussion would use the forums instead.

Being able to post a help question to the forums from within the client might be good.

Will this forum be Bingable? (oops, I mean googleable, umm, able to indexed by web search engines) and viewable to non-SL members? If so, that's good for finding answers and functional info, but might prompt LL to do a bit or a lot more moderating than is done here in this members only forum.

I'd be perfectly happy with the SLU software and style of forum presentation. Add in a General Discussion group and I cannot think of anything else I would need, except clear communication on whether it will or will not be moderated along with the associated clearly worded rules, and if moderation is to be the choice then actually do a credible job of it.

That is all.

*bump*

I'm actually starting to consider moving over to SLU.

I wonder if we couldn't get Cristiano to set up a new Forum much like our Resident Answers here; call it something easy like BASIC SL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS (aka Newbie McNewbiepants) and put it right at the top of the list of forums, easily seen by all. Maybe it could be understood that none of the usual SLU snarkiness could happen in the Newbie forum.

Then maybe we could ask Carl Metropolitan, Travis Lambert, Desmond Shang, and other new resident specialists to offer links to that forum. I do like SLU, I just think it's VERY intimidating to new users, even more so than here.

SLU isn't quite work-safe enough for me...

Me neither. That's why I was thinking about a work-safe and relatively flame-free section, like a Resident Answers. LOL, Cristiano could make it PG. *oh the irony*

Complete new forum concept and complete new database?

What happens with the those people who have posted so many thousand postings here? Do they have to start from zero?

Should LL add more functions (posting counts, forum ranks, community ranks, threat ratings)

thats why i am not wasting energy on this entire 'new forum' thing. they will do what they do and we really dont have any part of the process, no matter what x linden says.

Does post count really matter? There are people here who rarely speak up, but when they do, they offer sage and knowledgeable advice. Who cares what their post count is?

I like this format fine, but for one thing, searching a thread with hundreds of posts...

It's sorta like traffic in-world. Honest post counts do show some indication of how active somebody is.. I guess that could be seen as valuable if you're trying to judge how accurate a post is.

Then again, something from somebody with a relatively low post count like, say, for example, Andrew or Kelly Linden, is also probably worth paying attention to.

Click the Search button then do Advanced Search. Towards the bottom of that, you can tell it to show search hits as posts instead of threads. Makes it waaaaaay easier to find stuff in big threads.