Design the new Forums!!

see, this is how i know he just doesnt get it. this is why i think youre placing your hopes in a wasted effort. the forum has never been the point of soreness; linden labs shocking maintenance and disengagement is what annoys many people. he doesnt see the issue, 'shucks theys gonna cry no matters what we do'. funny thing is that they never did try to update the board, get working bb code and so on. they never tried to get someone at the admin panel that knew what the hell they were doing there was already one long ago exodus and of course the lindens caused that. one constant on the grid is ll making piss-poor decisions. its like our digital force of nature.

sounds like the toothfairy.
how old are you?

Hey guys, thanks for the continued feedback in this thread (and great summary of my recent office hour, Seven <3). I've started pointing residents who express concern in related issues here, so they can add to the discussion if they choose.

Wanted to let you know that after a couple office hours, some heavy bag practice here (all those awesome Mission burritos have moved me up a weight class!) and an internal meeting on basic across-the-board moderation needs (xstreet forums, blogs, pJira, etc) I've got a good first round of feedback that I'm compiling to present to various communication stakeholders here at the Lab. Your feedback has been invaluable, thanks very much!

Next steps will include narrowing down the issues for a round of brown bags with specific individuals (from as broad a range of use-cases as possible) that have a vested interest in the forums. After that, we'll create a beta forum so that some of you can dive in and beat on the software trying to break it or indicate missing functionality. (Still not sure if closed or open beta makes the most sense. Probably open I'd think for stress testing, no?) I expect we'll move on these next steps in the upcoming weeks, before the end of Q2.

Thanks again

That's interesting. The thing is, there's breach of the ToS "contract", and there's real honest to god law violations. If somebody is using the Forums to plot sedition, yeah, they're in big trouble. But if somebody, say, preaches intolerance in some way that violates the ToS, LL has complete latitude in how it chooses to discipline that person. (Well, not *complete* latitude: LL can get itself in trouble by *over*-extending its authority. ToS or not, taking of property may not be a recourse that LL can exercise without a court order. But that's for Linden counsel to worry about.)

The point is that it would be best if LL could set some bright line between conditions that have Forums-only consequences and those that must have in-world implications. (Or other implications, in a situation where Linden Lab has other business relationships with the account holder--notably including employment.)

It would go down a lot better if folks knew that they can't incur in-world penalties for a bad post on a bad day, but that LL is required to penalize them across the board for divulging state secrets. Counsel will need to devise a clear and accurate expression of that distinction.
As difficult as it may be for Forums regulars to understand, there are residents who think the Forums is teh evil and those who post here belong in a circle of hell somewhere between child molesters and hedge fund managers.

But we the wicked generally like our little den of iniquity.

bump

There are folks (at least one) banned from posting in some forums but not all, so "ToS violations have to carry same discipline across the board for all LL spaces" is not actually being applied.

From a personal point of view, it doesn't matter what the new forums look like or what features they have if I can't access them reliably and when accessing them count on being able to use them without crashing the browser or locking up the computer, which is unfortunately the case trying to use blogs.secondlife.com.

I would like to see no change to a new forum system until the poll system in Second Life Answers works, and the various problems described at http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-982 are solved. Linden staff saying "it works for me" doesn't do me a bit of good.

Oh by the way, there's a working poll asking how you like Second Life Answers at /327/eb/323658/1.html . 96 votes so far.

The heaviest stresses the forum software must be able to endure are concurrency (thousands of people viewing while hundreds are posting all at the same time) and long thread lengths (some threads here on the vBulletin system are exceeding 5,000 posts, with one approaching 75,000 posts). While the former is more a function of your database and web servers' robustness, your forum has to be able to handle these without melting down, crashing, or taking down peoples' browsers.

With respect to people who use ignore thread why not erase it (since NO ONE is going to read previous pages) and let it start again? It's like someone collecting old copies of Enquire. It's cumbersome and really is gossip. I don''t mind it, just do we need to keep all those pages of yatter?

You're right, but that stuff can keep a thread alive.

.

I check old threads, lengthy threads, frequently. Just in past few weeks I've wished several times that the old forums that were deleted entirely because of their heated disputes and personal attacks were still available. They had parts of the history of SL in them, parts which are forever gone to the public's eye.

Just in the past few weeks I've checked the internet archives and clicked on every link avaiilable for secondlife.com , many of which are invalid, in the hopes that maybe one of the old forum posts were available.

That reminds me, the system now limits returned search results to a maximum of 200. This is maddening. I want all the search results to be listed, no matter if it's thousands of results.

I have had this thought since I first heard that the current *new* site was nothing like what they will probably use.

My guess is that they really were planning on using that format and software until we did the major outcry and then they started back-peddling.





A few of the forums that I am on only show the signature in the first post by a person in each thread.

Ah, good point...as you suggest it would make sense to be more specific if/when the guidelines end up re-written in this process. Bad days certainly can't be considered a rationale to absolve one's self of all responsibilities, of course, but most people at my office hour believed that moderation should be light. So I'm interpreting that to mean going easy on the "trolling, flaming" bits rather than ToS violations.

And yeah some people aren't fond of forums in general, but I was referring more to the fact that the happy people tend to be over there humming happily to themselves while the angry people are making a great deal of the noise.
So next time a Linden does something you appreciate, please consider dropping them an IM to say "HEY I LOVE THAT"...they won't know what hit em.

Posts like *this* are always appreciated. It sounds like you mean it rather than having had it checked by the PR censorship machine first.

Pep (Whether you can convince the corporate machine to endorse your views is another thing, of course, but is something that we would encourage you to pursue.)

PS I am Brenda's male alter ego.

ARE YOU INSANE??????

What is this issue with keeping things like Undead Thread? It's like 95 years of National Geographics - chuck it OUT and start again.

it's the social corner of the forum.

it's how some of us get a connection to SL when we can't get inworld.

it also gives helpful people a reason to be around and answer questions.

.

I do not contribute to the never ending thread anymore but I do see the appeal. The point is not the previous 4913 pages, but the page you are on and contributing or responding to. It is a community, a vibrant one that anyone is welcome to join.

i think folks might be more willing to surrender the undead thread if there were an offtopic forum. Perhaps it would split into multiple threads then: a breakfast thread, a nature photography thread, and in the SL Discussions area, an SL Adventures thread, and threads for inworld forum community parties. Right now, that single thread is the only safe place for offtopic posts and just plain pleasant socializing.
.

Usually.

Pep (You forgot about the KitschKats subforum, a Vanity Portraits section and a whole thread devoted to "me too" posts especially for 3Ring.)

That isn't a nice accusation!

Pep (I thought you liked Blue. )

PS Sorry, I talk to myself a lot nowadays.

Haha...if anything, I'll probably argue that many of LL's communications issues come from the fact that Lindens are typically empowered to speak about their projects without having to go through a central messaging filter ("censorship machine" and when things are moving fast, they aren't always perfectly in sync. With some projects, people complain that they get different answers from different team members.

Not that I'd recommend installing the filter, mind you, but better sync is always...you know...better.



And I wonder if it would make sense to keep ONE thread alive...or undead as it were. I'll investigate.

It's not THE Thread itself. I won't speak for anyone but myself, but I don't need to see it brought along, just as long as there is a similar place in the New Whatever it will be, where similar conversation can take place. Someone else said it, but that tthat thread isn't about what happened on previous pages. It is about what is happening on the current page.

/me has never even viewed that thread.

The point is that these forums work really well and help a lot of people. If you want to make peoples SL better, messing with something that works isn't the solution.

I would love to have reason to send Lindens "woot! TY, TY, TY!" notes every. Really - this would be GREAT! Killing these forums off, even if you leave one spam thread around, isn't the way to get me to do that though. Nor is not acknowledging the resident response to the adult content stuff. Or not addressing the sim stalls that have being torturing us all lately (there's a number of threads on this here). Or the whole openspace fiasco of last year. Or etc, etc, etc..

My SL hasn't been getting better and as long as LL continues to ignore what residents are actually asking for, it will probably continue to get worse.

In some cases, even listening to their own employees might actually prove to be worth their while, let alone listening to us poor bastards subjected to the whims of the people in charge of this "killer app."

Never mind the New Forum, what the Hell is going on with this one today?