Design the new Forums!!

Thank you for posting, Blue! Sadly, I'm rather pessimistic about the forums, myself, because we have been told "soon," "next month," "later this year," so often that.. well, I'm in the position of "I'll believe it when I see it."

My biggest request is a General Discussions forum, for those of us who actually want to build a forum community or keep up with actual SL topics. We've kinda turned RA into that, which drowns out those really needing help.

Everything else, I'd rather wait to see the new forum format in action before I make requests for tools, sub forums and the like.

And for moderation? Don't care WHO does it as long as there are clear guidelines for them to follow and that we have an actual way of requesting a review of punishments. The use of in world suspension should be limited to those who are excessive repeat offenders, like those who create new accounts for the sole purpose of harassing or otherwise disturbing the peace in a hateful manner. Otherwise, ban/suspend them from the forum only.

Okay, that's my two cents worth. For the complete dollar list, I'd rather see the new forum software in action. I'm adaptable.

I think Blue's bear can be had at his office.. Maybe..

/me adds her thanks to Blue for braving into the forums.

Unless something goes horribly wrong at LL, we'll always have you outnumbered. If you continue to be successful, you will only get even more outnumbered.

On the new Answers stuff, I really hate it, Blue. Really, really, really. The software is soooo buggy and, to be honest, I think the points stuff may do more harm than good - there are plenty of people here who are willing to help others and have been doing just that for years. Adding a points system makes it into a contest where some will favor quantity instead of quality. Very, very few coherent questions go unanswered here in these forums - please don't mess with it!

Throwing new software at the problem, especially new software that's buggy, is not the answer. What's really needed, IMO anyway, is for LL to get more engaged with residents. I think we all know that LL can't possibly keep up with everything that goes on here - like you said, you're hugely outnumbered. I also remember well the old Linden Answers forum and understand why it died.

Please take a look at this thread: . The OP is spam but the idea mentioned at post #3 is something I think might work well towards effectively getting LL more engaged with the population without making you more swamped than you already are. This (again IMO) is what you really need to be doing - it'd be a small investment with lots of return in resident faith if LL would just engage a bit more.


You guys hobbled the forums like 2 years ago, Blue. Two years. Talk is seriously devalued at this point..


edit: 2 Blue posts while I typed that.. When it rains, it pours!!


Don't need new software! I would rather use this old & hobbled forums than that stuff! Really, aside from formatting, what does the new software get you?? Angry residents? You've already got those!


The people that hated the resmods so much were a small but vocal minority... Several, after having Katt try to mod us and the talk of 3rd-party come up, came back and said that Strife really wasn't that bad after all. I personally never had a problem with him and thought he did a good job.

To be able ot choose how many posts per page we download, helps for when dl is slow

To be able to reverse posts so the latest is the first you see.

& to have priv messages

I am not advocating ResMods either, I don't think an active community member should be placed in that position. I know I couldn't do it. I think the moderation should be done by Lindens. it's their product, their website, they should ensure it shows that product in the best light

And yes, I am saying forum discipline should not be carried out in world. It's double jeopardy. A forum should be a place where the all opinions should be heard, as long as they are expressed civilly. Someone not behaving in the forum can be banned, that stops them from being a nuisance. The spectre of an inworld ban , I think, would stop many people from posting in the forum at all, or at the least from speaking their true feelings, stifling legitimate debate.

Thanks for stopping by, Blue.These folks are right, and they refer specifically to a very recent fiasco. Over the course of several months, Qie and I actively lobbied LL to provide moderation for and upgrade the forums. We solicited feedback in several threads here, filed a Jira and recruted votes, consolidated feedback, presented it to Robin and whoever else would take it. Robin was great, spent time, spoke of forums change not only privately but on the Blog. Katt was assigned to do it (October), and nothing happened.

I understand you weren't involved, in fact I'd wager you had no idea this all happened. It's fresh in our minds, though. So it is totally understandable if forumites are leery of Lindens bearing gifts (I imagine particularly wary if I'm involved, which I wish I'd realized earlier).
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May I have one too please?Most forums handle "resmod" issues quite well. The real issue here, though, is in how our posting accounts and our in-world accounts are linked. A slip of the tongue here on the forums can (and often has) result in in-world suspension. It is for this reason that most here view resmods with deep suspicion. Add in the G-Teams legendary inconsistency with regards to what is okay versus what isn't, and you can understand why there are such feelings of contempt toward moderators in general here. If you de-link forum behavior from in-world privileges, I guarantee people's attitudes here will change.I've been a mod for many years now, in different forums. Yes, tying one's game privileges to their forum behavior is an effective deterrent, in much the same way as dragging people out of their apartments and shooting them when they don't pay rent on time is an effective deterrent against late payments; but neither are very good at fostering good will and a sense of community.

This is the biggest problem we have with the change in forum software in the first place. The new forum will be turned on, the old forums will be marked read-only, and not only will the enormous wealth of information contained here slowly sink into oblivion (an archived forum is "out of sight, out of mind", but the entire community as it is now will be forever altered!

Here's another analogy: When you move into a brand new home, you take great pains to keep it looking new, right down to beating the kids if they scuff the carpet or smudge the walls. By contrast, if you live in an older, "settled" house, nobody cares if someone gets fingerprints on the walls or accidentally breaks a window or stops up the commode. The point here is, when you force everyone to move to the new forum, nobody is going to be comfortable. There will be no community; only a large number of individuals tip-toeing on eggshells. It will take years to get everyone back to the same level of comfort where we are right now.

This may be completely necessary; however, if there is NO choice in the matter, it would at least be an easier pill to swallow if we knew WHY the current forum setup is inadequate; if we knew WHY it is not sufficient to just simply update the current vBulletin software so that we could get our eye-candy back; if we knew WHY the move to new software is the only viable option. We may not like it, but we could at least be able to accept it if this was all explained to us, treating us like the adults we are.

I've spent a lot of time in corporate wonderland, and it seems to me that this Clearspace forum rework is very likely to actually happen. For reasons that Blue (or any Linden) is unlikely to say out loud.

LL's made it clear over the years that they do not want to invest in vBulletin, no matter how trivial the investment would be. Replacing vBulletin with Clearspace Discussions (forums), as another feature in the package they've already rolled out, will actually PLEASE the powers that be at LL. It would probably be seen as a (politically popular) upgrade to the forums.

Think about it from LL's overall business point of view. Clearspace is billed as Social Networking Software for business, not a "bulletin board". This is forum work that increases LL's shininess quotient. Particularly as the potential for strategic partnership with Jive (resulting in some sort of future merger) is greater than zero.

I think there is no hope that LL will upgrade vBulletin. EVEN THOUGH THAT IS THE BEST COURSE FOR THE COMMUNITY HERE, BECAUSE IT PRESERVES THE EXPERTISE OF YEARS ... they will not do it.

However, all is not lost. Go to the forums Blue pointed at: http://forums.cnet.com/?tag=forum-w%3bxNav. This could work. It's CNET - the traffic is pretty high. (Blue, please note that Cnet has an Off Topic forum, by the way).

LL has not asked for our input on this, but Blue is willing to listen. I think we have a chance to help steer this train - if we stand around debating whether it really exists, we will get run over. I think we have no hope of derailing it.

Are we afraid to look like fools by being sucked in by LL again? Why? Do we really think there are evil plotters somewhere TRYING to sucker us, and laughing when it works? Nah. Incompetence or inattention is always the reason why things don't happen with LL, as with all companies.

If we're suspicious, hold back, and it turns out that nothing happens, what have we gained? I think we should get on board, look at CNET's boards, and point out things we need that aren't there.
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It seems like change for changes sake. I would much rather they spent time working on actual problems or things we've asked for.

Why change the forums? Why do the new answers thing that's only for resident-resident answers? What problem does this stuff solve? There are plenty of things they could be spending their time on. I'm unhappy that they're making new things up to work on that seem like a step backwards when they could be doing more productive work instead.

I took a quick look at the cnet forums and didn't anything close to the volume we get here. LL's adult content stuff generated something like 15,000 posts - how much do you see at the cnet forums that have even 1% that sort of volume?


Yeah, well, there it is right there.

Hopefully, Blue will not see the pushback as a personal attack on him but as an indication of the growing resident feelings towards LL.

You have some good points here. To me, it's honestly got nothing to do with vBulletin itself, other than the fact that it's what all of us here are familiar with. As long as whatever new software that replaces it has all of the same functionality and ease of navigation as what we are used to now, I think we could all adapt.

My biggest concerns are the loss of information - or, more specifically, the loss of continuity with all of this information - that will happen if we change software. If the move is absolutely necessary, then I would look into finding tools, scripts, or methods to import the entirety of our current forum's database into the new forum.

My other concern is that Linden Labs will want to keep the new forums as squeaky-clean and sanitary as long as absolutely possible; this fact alone will stifle meaningful discussion. Couple that with LL's apparent reasons for going with Jive, that you mentioned (Jive being more suited for business networking than casual conversation), and one can't help but think that LL will stomp down rather hard on any discussion that isn't pro-business. Couple all that with the current policy of carrying disciplinary action in the forum to in-world consequences, and you have yourself a discussion environment that is so openly hostile to candid discussion that nobody will want to post there.

Nika's post #82 sums up things nicely. LL's vision for the SL forum is a reflection of it's vision of SL itself. It has changed as we are all aware of thanks to recent events. SL is destined to be a primarily a RL business tool, aimed at the corporate customer. The corporate culture is straitlaced, buttoned down and orderly. That is the face LL want reflected for SL. Nothing else will be permitted.

I believe we did have "General" thread at one point, and it was a massive flame-a-thon...but I suppose if the mods are taking care of business, then that's not as much of a problem, especially if people see a value in it.

On hating SLAnswers...yes, I've run into more bugs than I'd have liked. But I'll play optimist and point out that bugs can be squashed. As far as whether points are to the detriment of people who are already notoriously and lovably helpful on the forums...why can't we have both?

"it'd be a small investment with lots of return in resident faith if LL would just engage a bit more."
I agree that LL fell out of close communication for a while at the end of the old blogs and understood that it was a problem. I've been working with Catherine and M and some others to make sure that LL bloggers know that this is a discussion and not a broadcast medium. If you check out M's involvement with those commenting on his posts, I think you'll see that he's in there making the effort and that he gets it. Hopefully we'll get all the Linden bloggers up to that level of interactivity on an ongoing basis.

"Really, aside from formatting, what does the new software get you?"
A lot....really, lots of options. What you see now is the base model. But yeah, all that AND angry residents. Lucky me

Ian, PMs are an option for sure....don't know about the other two, but will put them on the list of requests.

Tying inworld behavior to forums as directly related to the resmod issue...definitely a very good observation. I'll make sure that's part of any discussion on the subject.

As to the potential loss of information on current vBulliten forums, we had a certain amount of loss when we contracted out to have old blogs integrated into new ones. I really would like that even less if it were to happen with the kind of resident resources and community that exists in the forums. I think that's a nigh-unacceptable risk and would rather we don't make the attempt. I think that a better option would be to look into a way to make the old forums read-only, but searchable from the new forums so that they are just as accessible, if not more so.

And yes, the plan really is to transition to a single system. I know you guys are not thrilled by it and I can understand that. I hope you'll give it a chance, and will continue to tell LL what you want.

Dinnertime. Thanks for the passionate feedback all.

It would be nice if it could automatically parse SLURLs to show their location and perhaps optionally even teleport you directly without having to go to the SLURL site first.

That would be a good idea, and wouldn't be hard to do. Just simply take a call to slurl.com, like so:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kit%20Kat%20Island/128/128/25/

and change it to a clickable teleport, like so:

secondlife://Kit%20Kat%20Island/128/128/25

You guys are are hearing that this change isn't wanted. The existing system that's been working for years, though a bit hobbled, still works fine. The new system, from the comments I've seen, is buggy for pretty much every browser in existance.

I'd planned to come hassle you at your office hour but why bother if LL has already made up its mind to do exactly what's NOT being asked for? This is like all the adult content "discussion." Thousands and thousands of posts begging LL to not do it, all for nothing..

I just had my computer "lock up" again upon using the Second Life Answers pages.

The "locking up" consists of all running applications becoming unresponsive. I was still able to restart the computer using the task manager. I was not able to close the browser.

This "render all applications unresponsive requiring a restart" is becoming rather a frequent result when trying (and failing) to use the blogs.secondlife.com pages.

Newcomers to the Second Life site are probably not going to beat their head against a brick wall trying to use a defective web site; there are many other pages to visit on the internet that do work just fine, so the chances of hearing many reports of problems from lost potential customers is small, particularly so if they base their judgment of LL's responsiveness on the lack of LL response to numerous reports of site failure in the discussions and comments at Second Life Answers .

Blue, if you happen to read this, you might take a look at the functioning poll on SLA at /327/eb/323658/1.html .

The poll in SLA doesn't work.

By the way, that CNET forum doesn't allow you to sort the threads by column header.

Yeah; it's really nice, the way Windows ties everything to a single instance of explorer.exe, so if something causes it to hang, the entire system is dead. At least with Linux, when the blogs cause Firefox to hang, I can simply pop open a terminal and kill it.

But I agree... I've had strange Firefox hangs while navigating the blogs. However, what is most often the case, is that some blog threads are sooooo long, that Firefox appears to become unresponsive while trying to load and parse it all.

I have since discovered that I can change to flat view from threaded, and that flat view also serves to break long blog entries and discussions into pages. This significantly cuts down on the hangs.

There is an option to change this, in Windows Explorer, Tools, Folder Options, "Launch folder windows in a separate process".

At least that is for WinXP, not sure about Vista but I would imagine the option is there someplace. I always have it checked btw and get fewer problems. The real problem is that this setting is not the defualt, go figure

*runs to check her settings. Thanks.

I finally got around to logging in, Thank You for the bear, Blue. He is adorable. I'll take him up in the Huey first chance I get.

Thank you also for at least coming here and listening.

Always a pleasure VV


I also want to say another thanks for the bear

I second this, it takes a brave Linden to dive in amongst us lot

BTW Brenda, I love your most recent signature

I thought I'd throw that little reminder out there, as a public service.

Ah, well, you knew I couldn't let this go We always disagree on this, but at least we do it nicely!

I disagree, primary because I know two things, and these are the things that I know:

1. Linden's available market in enterprise B2B collaboration is vanishingly small in comparison to its entertainment/social networking market. Now, perhaps they can monetize the collab market more effectively than the social networking one, or perhaps they can put together some very powerful blend of advertising and collab. Who knows? But social networking - dancing, decorating, shopping, sex, roleplay - is the meat and potatoes of LL's business now, and for the foreseeable future. Think: their social networking market space is at least EVERYONE in the world who can afford equipment and has a restriction barring them from a full real life - whether that restriction be temporary or permanent. Just counting the U.S.'s aging boomers, that market is immense, and the usage in minutes/day is very high among that one segment.

2. LL will be going public ASAP - maybe another year. They NEED some success in enterprises - it validates and expands their market appeal immensely. Jumps them from being a game that makes money for a few people to being a platform for all aspects of life. Up until a few months ago, their performance in enterprise markets was appalling. I think that is why we are seeing a big push - not because they intend to convert the whole grid to business, but because they MUST, within a year, have some successes to point to.

*drops a curtsy -- oops, a bottle of Brenda's favorite drink falls out of her skirt as she does so --- and trots off to bed*
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You know this. I know this. But I have my doubts that Linden Labs knows this! Or at the very least, not enough to stop them from throwing the baby out with the bathwater in their attempt to woo this nearly-nonexistent market.

QFT, yet again. You all keep asking us what we want, and we keep saying, "Update the vBulletin software!" For years and years this has been going on. You keep asking, we keep responding, and you keep ignoring. So why ask anymore?

Blue, I totally respect and appreciate that you're actually coming in here and participating... the thing is, that we've seen this over and over again, to no result. Over and over again, we request updated software, and LL insists on buying other stuff. The whole thing is incredibly frustrating and despair-inducing.

I love Second Life, I really do. But I honestly wonder about LL's integrity. It swears up and down that it wants input, and doesn't want us to be negatrons and discourage other residents from speaking up, but then when we DO speak up, it ignores us and bulldozes right over anything we might have to say.

I'm starting to feel like those people on Whale Wars... you know... they holler and they protest and they act, and still whales get killed. Only in this case, the whales are the Forums.

The problem I have with this is that it seems the transition to Clearspace is the objective, and the forums upgrade is one tickbox on some PowerPoint slide somewhere, waiting to be checked.* If it just doesn't work--if it can never handle the volume (it already gets painfully slow when there's an active blog discussion topic), or if the browser incompatibilities are just too much for Jive's developers (if anything, the WEB-982 cluster is getting worse, not better), or if something new and unexpected gets in the way--what will happen?

That tickbox might get checked, for some operational definition of "completed" but it may leave forums users pining for the good ol' days of vBull even in its current musty, fusty state.

I perceive the likelihood of that outcome to be greater because the main objective seems to be "transition to Clearspace," not "upgrade the Forums."

On the other hand, I can see this working out fine if the Jive developers are on-board as an active part of the deployment team and well aware that they may have significant work to do on their own internals. If they're hungry enough and competent, a small team of developers can do wonders.

So okay. We hope for the best.

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*I'd love to believe that some project management process more sophisticated than slideware is in use. Or even just an intern with a clipboard.