Design the new Forums!!

im glad _somebody_ said it.

Blue, I am glad you chose to come in here, and are hanging in, please don't punch out on us. You've been around a long time, you have spent time in the forum as shown by your post count, and that is appreciated. I never met you or any Linden inworld, but you have a reputation of flying straight. *How many flying analogies can she cram in to this, anyway?*

I care about this forum far more than SL itself at times, I spend more time here, this is where my socializing is done, I tend to be a solitary sort inworld. But a lot of the people here care a great deal about SL, want it to succed and grow, and want to help. And they are a wealth of knowledge and experience. They are offering all that, free of charge, with just the condidtion that someone will listen and just consider what they have to say.

Someone made a simple request that this forum be fixed up, brought up to specs and put back on he flight line. If it crashes and burns fine, then you guys can do as you plan. But if it manages to gather some lift and stay airborne, SL will have an incredible asset to it's growth and survival, at a very cheap price, I think.

C'mon Blue. Give us the thumbs up. If you won't do it for us, do it for this little guy:

Besides, the bear is the weapons control officer.

And a damn fine one.

I was beginning to think yue would never notice me.

You have to understand, there is a LOT of pent-up frustration among the people here that needs to vent, along with a large amount of distrust. It's not often that we are genuinely solicited for our inputs, and it's rarer still that our inputs are genuinely considered.

I truly believe you have the best of intentions here, Blue. It is just going to take most of us here seeing results to pull us away from feeling like we are just spinning our wheels here.

Folks keep saying they want LL to listen -- I think Blue has. He has heard our request to update VB, and responded that LL has decided against it. Yes, LL has handed us lemons, and we have the usual choices.

Perhaps we should listen to Blue as well. What I hear from him is:

>> The decision has been made to create new forums using Jive Forums. Blue cannot change that decision. Presumably, that decision would only be changed if the software actually didn't work. (/me points at Qie's comment about Blog performance, as well as WEB-982).

>> Blue will be involved with creating those new forums, so is the right guy to talk to if we need specific features in them.

>> He is willing and interested in hearing about how to make the new forums usable. It is early days, so comments might actually have an effect.

>> He has suggested that he get Jive's search function modified to transparently search these threads as well as the new ones, which personally I think would be a lot of work on LL's & Jive's part, and help us out a lot in preserving expertise.

>> He has suggested that we look at CNET's forums as a basis in evaluating the functionality. They are certainly a better starting point than SL Answers.

Can we return to the original purpose of this thread, suggestions for functionality we need in the new forums? Several good points have been made. I'd love to hear more.
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I think LL really needs to be yelled at - they've been real dorks over the last year - but it's unfortunate that Blue is the only target around. He seems like a really nicy guy and I hope people who are angry at LL but not him in particular try to make that clear. I don't think he's getting paid to be here in the forums...


This is one of the things that angers me.. WHY can't this decision be changed? Because it was made a long time ago? That's a really, REALLY horrible reason.


I'd like them more if they worked at least as well as these forums. They don't today.

I'm concerned about the voting stuff. The Answers Linden (Lexie?) insists that the voting stuff works fine for her on FF and IE but I've only see one resident say it works for them. LL has a history of "works for us. resolved!" and I hope they're planning to get a large sample of residents in there...


Yeah, well, these forums here are usable now.

The bling on the new ones is a turn off for me. It's just extra bandwidth and stuff I have to learn that gets in the way of my rantings. Want rant now! Seriously, it's just more stuff that doesn't really add and can break..


Try searching for Cyn's blog posts about the adult content stuff. How does the time it actually takes to find the first one compare with how quickly you think it should take?


/me didn't see a New Posts button - could be that I just don't have an account but this is a must-have, IMO. I very rarely look at individual forums unless I'm creating a new thread -all other times it's the New Posts button..

ditto. A New Posts function is really nice. I looked at individual forums for years, then took someone's suggestion to use New Posts, and have used it almost exclusively for a year or two now.

I just signed up a cnet to browse the software. I didn't see a "post" button but each post has a "reply" button. It looks like quotes don't get imbedded as they do here. I haven't checked for user modifications to see what that would change.

There is a button on the left called "Forum real-time activity".

This is the description:

Oh.. TY!

Why is it only showing me 5 posts? Anybody have an account there that can say if it actually does what New Posts does? New Posts does the exact correct thing, IMO.

I did sign up. I didn't see a way to change the number visible. But I don't know how active that place is.

I just posted a question there, and the number of posts shown in the realtime display did not change.

My question was about the Community Polls forum - whether there are any multiple choice selectors in their polling system. I was wondering if the polling system there doesn't work like the one in Second Life Answers doesn't work.

I posted a couple there - it looks like the page is limited to the (edit: now it's 10 showing. maybe it's time-limited?)

OTOH, the page updates automagically, which is nice. Hopefully one can set the update frequency - if it updates for every post on LL's forums, gah!

I, too, am puzzled by the polls. I do note, however, that CNET's forum is still in beta.
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Are there any examples of Jive software being used for forums for something more like Second Life? Like a video game perhaps?

I knew I shouldn't have spoken my mind. That's part of why my posts have for so long been predominantly attempts to solve people's technical problems. I wasn't trying to drive Blue away.

From my brief exposure to the cnet forum, I would say that it isn't as bad as the xstreetsl layout but by no means better than here or slu for convenience, especially in a work environment that many of us do the majority of our postings. If the add some more functionality, it might be okay. Just a bit of a new learning curve.

Here's a link to some Jive software powered sites: http://www.jivesoftware.com/customers .

The E! forum looks like a forum: http://boards.eonline.com/Insider/Boards/index.jspa .
It's slow on my machine. I don't feel like joining E! to try it out.

The jivesoftware.com jivespace site gives some idea of what some of Jive's software can do: http://www.jivesoftware.com/jivespace/index.jspa .

This would probably be the most relevant Jive powered forum:

http://forums.oracle.com

Multi page threads, new message, ratings etc............

Some folks are taking Blue's comments to indicate that the final result of the forum replacement will not be anything like the current SL Answers beta.

This would of course be wonderful, but I find it hard to believe.

Blue himself has called the problems with the current beta "bugs" - which means DETAILS to fix.

I take his remark about CNET forums only to mean that navigational pages will be added to the current SL Answers beta.

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Does anyone besides me enjoy the irony of LL using something called Jive for it's new forum?

I don't understand why the "beta" was put up at all.

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a band i dig did something similar, and started using a forum called 'groupee'

I don't understand why the beta was put up if it doesn't resemble the final product. Maybe I don't understand what a beta release is, but I thought it was software that was basically ready for public consumption. Pretty much the final design.

If substantial features are missing, if it doesn't look the way it's supposed to, I don't think it's a beta.

I don't want to argue about words, though.

The thing is, there is nothing (as far as I saw) in the blog announcement or in the SL Answers pages to indicate that it is a preliminary design, a proof-of-concept, a trial balloon, not really what it will look like, etc.

Instead, there was an invitation to look around and give feedback, and all the comments I saw indicated that *details* would be different, but not that there would be an substantial, systemic change to what we saw in the beta.

If there had been some sort of disclaimer, I would not have put the time into it that I did.

I would have looked around, posted something, but I wouldn't have given it as much thought as I did, and I certainly wouldn't have gotten as upset, frustrated and angry as I did.

If I'm wrong in what I've said above, I'd be happy to be shown I'm wrong.

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i dont know. the sl bri fondly recalls sounds nothing like the sl we live in today. i think LL takes the 'LAB' bit more seriously than people realise.