Closing forums for no reason

Here's a question for you, residents, which I want an answer to. Any ideas why the moderators keep closing forums that are not off-topic? We ask questions, we want answers, resident answers is therefore an appropriate place to do it.

It's a great shame it's happening. A lot of people puting intelligent insight together for the guidance and education of others. I thought that's what a support forum was for.

Excellent questions. To at least partially answer, in the not-too-distant past we used to have forums where a broader range of SL discussion took place (General, Land and Economy, Off Topic (later called The Sandbox) and a Bulletin Board), and good times they were.

What happened was (my personal take - this is pretty much the only thing I'm particularly critical of LL on), as the world grew in size, the resources directed at the forums by LL decreased, moving from moderation by Linden staff to the infamous res-mod program, volunteers from amongst the residents. As a consequence, moderation became inconsistent, leading to confusion and resentment, exacerbated by the application of in-world punishments to forum violations. The situation deteriorated until LL apparently threw their hands up in despair, and closed those forums.

Others might say it's because we all acted up.

So now we have this forum, which is intended to be more limited in scope - not general discussion, but answers by residents to specific SL-related questions, hence the closing of some threads.

Alas though, I fear the lessons of history have not been learnt, because now we have even more residents, on top of a narrowing of discussion, and even less resources being applied to the forums... there's only a couple of res-mods apparently still standing, and they don't drop in very often... leading to more confusion etc.

All is not lost though! There are some excellent resident-run websites where you can still enjoy a broader range of SL discussion, like SLUniverse, Second Citizen, SL Homepage and YASLF. (There's more, but I forget the names - apologies).

Hope that helps.

Thanks Fade! I shall investigate

I have seen threads closed left and right that ARE off topic, or that have strayed off topic.

I used to post pretty prolificly on the old forums (the general forum and the Sandbox) before they were closed. They were closed for exactly the same kinds of threads that are being closed here.

We have recently seen threads about:

1. Gender-switching (which was never a "help me" thread to begin with)
   
2. 13 year old prostitutes (the question was answered in the first couple of responses. Then it degenerated in to a combination of "you're a liar" and "13 year olds CAN TOO have sex!" thread)
   
3. RANTS about large corporations using SL as an advertising medium
   
4. RANTS about SL censoring content
   
5. Personal ads
   
6. Jokes
   
7. Calls for boycott
   

None of those threads qualifies as a "help me" thread, and they should have been closed. The rules here are pretty clear: this is a forum to get help from other residents. It's not a place to make political statements, post rants, or debate topics of any kind (unless it's maybe which piece of hardware is better).

If you've noticed, even topics that started out as legit threads often get hijacked. In that case, it was certainly appropriate for them to be closed.

Honestly: I don't see the problem. I don't understand why people come in and treat this like a conversation board. It's not. It's for getting help. Perhaps a moderator needs to make a sticky with a link to the more popular resident run forums, so comments like "if we can't use this to chat, what good is it?" don't get made.

I do hope a mod sees this comment. I wouldn't mind a short list just to check out.

Wait...so the two off-topic general chat boards got closed because people were off-topic and engaging in general chat?

There is a forum here in these Linden Lab Second Life Forums for announcing resident sites, some of which may have forums.



Those looking for forums with different content rules than these forums would do well to take the time to look through the threads in the Resident-Run Websites forum.

Here's some sites with SL forums:

- sluniverse.com
- sldrama.com
- sl-forums.com
- yaslf.com
- slhomepage.com
- secondlifes.com
- sl.stratics.com
- slorums.net

Those with nothing better to put in their signatures here might place a list similar to the above in their signatures to make this information readily available.

The link for the "fansite" page in the secondlife.com website is at: http://secondlife.com/community/fansites.php .

There is a link on that fansite page to a list of SL forum links on del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/secondlife/forum .

It is also possible to find third party forums related to Second Life by using a search engine such as google.com or yahoo.com and searching for things like "Second Life" and "third party forums".

Several of the third party sites listed above include lists of links to third party forums other than their own.

There is a blog compilation site, I think you might call it, at http://planet.worldofsl.com/ .

That was an excellent post, Dr. Tardis.

Incidentally, the moderators aren't closing forums, they're closing threads

We were bad.

I think we deserve a spanking.

To nitpick a little...

Moderators close threads. Not forums.

LL closes forums and have posted their reasons for doing so.

Threads in Resident Answers are closed because they weren't following the charter for this forum:

"Resident Answers is a simple, friendly place to ask your fellow Residents of Second Life for help."

Sure there may be a debate over the answer to a resident's request for help... But asking for help to do something detrimental to SL would seem rather off-sides, as would a controversial "call for opinions".

If you post a question about how to do something in Secend Life it will not be closed. If you post a question about the general meaning of life or some other such nonsence it will be closed.

It is really very simple.

I think we're getting off of the topic, which I'm pretty sure is spankings.