Last thread, last post on this.

Now *that* is an interesting (and self-serving) set of viewpoints: a future forum that is a depersonalised wasteland of sterile call and response, devoid of any social intercourse - yet excluding the even more stultifyingly boring witterings of the type found in the Zombie Thread. Adults? Next you'll be suggesting a eugenics programme, perhaps starting with a Help Island experience that filters out those who do not demonstrate an irrational desire to spend money inworld.

Pep (thinks that LL has got to Des, or maybe he wants to retain a viable communications channel for his own subtle propaganda.)

Would you be referring to your own copious and generally unpleasant contributions there?

Pep, is it possible that you are even MORE foul than usual following your hiatus?

Never boring, darling, as evidenced by the compulsion to respond to my provocations of even those who insist they will ignore me.

Pep (leaves the boring contributions to those with an unwavering agenda of desperate lipstick and leather feminism.)

Boring? No, I suppose not. But then neither is a root canal.

(I've never met a "desperate lipstick," although I've run across a few that looked rather baleful.)

Couple suggestions. If this happens only with long discussion threads and you're using "threaded view" instead of "flat", switching that may help. Secondly, if it's an option, you may want to consider switching browser to Firefox. (I realize that may be impossible for other reasons, but in my experience Firefox is generally less CPU-bound.)

Make up your mind: am I boring or not?

Pep (Ah, that's right; you are female and demand fickleness as a USP.)

NOW you are boring.

I'm fighting fire with fire.

Pep (Don't you like to be reminded of your predictability?)

(Oh, right: I was going to respond to the actual thread topic, until I distracted myself. )

So (as I've said) I've come around to the position that I'll give the new forums here a good try. And by that I mean more than a fair chance; they've already had a "fair chance" with SLA and the Commerce Forums and we all know they are horrid in innumerable ways, and yet that's beside the point now: If we value what community we have here, we may be willing to put up with crappy software (which we've done for years already, to a more familiar and lesser extent), and even tolerate what amounts to customer-abuse by the Lindens in the scheduling and conduct of this transition, in order to preserve what we value.

Des is asking us for more than that, however. He's posing a big challenge:
The challenge here is to act as adults whether or not they treat us that way. If they do, and we get an open discussion area, then using it responsibly and effectively, as Des details in his post, will speak volumes about our community.

The really hard part is just moving on if they don't give us that open discussion area. I think I understand Des's point, but I'm not sure I completely agree with him on this. I see the virtue in refusing to be brought down to LL's level, if they do this, and instead remain above such unproductive pettiness: let them have their little toy forums for sycophants and stooges. They can find their real customers elsewhere, in the grown-up forums and blogs.

And yet, Resident Answers itself has "lived outside the law" of its own official guidelines for years; it was the only way to continue here: bending the rules. And that may be necessary and possible again in the new forums.

I intend to simply ignore any change in guidelines, structure, and enforcement. Whichever area they open that seems the most like Resident Answers, I intend to use the same as Resident Answers until they warn me otherwise. If they warn me, I'll engage them in an public, civil discussion about the value of whatever I was doing to which they objected.

And only then, if the result isn't satisfactory to me, an adult and a customer, I'll go elsewhere.

I don't know if Des would agree with that or not, and if not I wish he'd come back and debate the point; maybe I could be persuaded.

Thankyou Desmond for such a wise post.

I have posted more silliness here in the last few days than I have in the whole of the rest of the time I've been here - just because it doesn't seem to matter anymore.

Over there, however, I have been, and will continue to be, on my best behaviour. I have stated over there that I will give the new place a good try, and so I will, although I'm not sure it's going to be my sort of place at all.

take care x

Me too. Since it is how I have conducted myself since I started posting here - without so much as a warning too - apart from the empty threats of those I have discommoded, and the odd raised eyebrow and impotent threat to stop the car and turn around, that is.

Pep (if enough people post enough then the Lindens won't find it economic to moderate; establishing forum alts independent of avatars used for inworld will mitigate punitive measures and eventually they will give up, just as they did with the current forums.)

I know that Desmond is perceived with almost religious awe by many on this board, so I'll choose my words carefully.

Most of his post appears to reference a forum which I don't recognize, either in terms of a valuable source of information to residents or as a means of effective and representative lobbying.

It actually made me smile while reading his plea for us to portray ourselves as adults even if we aren't always treated as such.

This smacks more of a teenage girl throwing a childish tantrum rather than a real life entrepreneur managing the strategic objectives of what is apparently a valuable business.

In a nutshell, LL is a business and you are customers. As with all businesses, LL will value you in direct proportion to the value proposition you represent.

If in fact the small, but self important and very vocal user base of this forum feels it is being treated as a valueless commodity, then the way to turn that around is by disproving the premise.

Difficult to do when even a cursory review of the content of this forum reveals nothing more than a mind numbing mountain of acne ridden teenage angst made even more embarassing by the fact that the authors are in fact required to be "adults" in order to make a contribution.

I always find this line of attack amusing, every single time, pot, kettle and black works perfectly to describe it.

Since we're in the mood for hacking idioms, I'll throw one back at you:

Proof, pudding, eating...

The very fact that LL has decided that this forum, in its current form, presents no value to itself or its "paying" customer base and is unlikely to be missed by the vast majority of residents, supports my point to a degree.

I'm sorry, and your point was exactly..?

Oh yes... "Wha' Eva' dude!" I believe was the intelligent contribution you were looking for.

Welcome to the forum Unklebob

I was going to try to not mar this thread with complaints, but this morning I went over to SLA to see what's what...

But honestly, it's hard to see what's going on there. It's daunting. I saw an endless list of threads, and my first reaction was, "How can I ever follow this?"

Then a few threads caught my eye, in particular one from Scylla, which was polite and well thought out, it seemed, asking how things will work when this forum closes.

Of course it was firmly locked.

Well, okay, I understand they are still working by SLA rules...

But as I went away to have some coffee, the old saying "the medium is the message" came to me.

Again we're in pot, kettle black territory. Adult behaviour is recognising how adults behave. Adults get into petty little piddling arguments over petty little piddling things inside SL, outside SL, in forums, at work, down the pub and at home. To try and pretend this doesn't happen is not adult behaviour. Linden Lab may have a goal of improving the human condition but they aren't going to stop that happening, as evidenced by your petty little backhanded insults.

Second Life Answers doesn't provide any value to the vast majority of "paying" customers, nor does any part of the blog, the vast majority of paying customers don't read it and therefore wouldn't miss it were it to be closed down. That doesn't mean they should close it down, because there is value there for some, without a shadow of a doubt.

And what's good for GM is good for the country, right?

I don't frankly know what monetary "value" should be assigned to the official forums. But I do know that the people here have been providing, free of charge, an important service for LL for many years now, by way of their enthusiastic and pretty selfless assistance to SL residents, new and old. These forums have served as an absolutely vital conduit for information of all kinds to a truly prodigious number of people for many years, and they have assisted the development of SL and its various communities in ways that are not quantifiable on a balance sheet. LL would be, to say the least, foolish to ignore that.

I'm afraid that I also believe, as I suspect you do not, in corporate ethics and responsibility. The commodification of the people here as merely another line item in a financial report may or may not make good business sense, but it is crappy ethics.

Well as I think we both know Scylla, my postings here have not in any way indicated my position with regard to "corporate ethics and responsibility". However it is nice, as always, of you to misrepresent a person's position in order to score points.

If indication would be appreciated, I'll give you a clue by saying that the real battle ground of corporate ethics, where real people make real contributions, is in my view debased when associated with this particular little bout of hysterics.

I agree that "value" is often intangible and subjective. My point, opaque perhaps as it was, is that the needs of the few do not always necessarily outweigh the needs of the many.

Needless to say I also disagree with the idea that this forum has acted as an "absolutely vital conduit for information of all kinds to a truly prodigious number of people for many years".

My view is that as a conduit of vital information it might be designed slightly better and that residents young and old should not necessarily have to play hunt the needle in quite such a mountainous haystack.

hahahahahaha - oh, I'm sorry. You were being serious? You *were* referring to that hellish maze known as the blogs, right?

Even in its current crippled state from years of neglect these fora far outshine the blogs in terms of usability.

1 - Click - open forum
2 - Click - New Posts
3 - Read and digest

How do I do that with the blogs?

Just because it hasn't been that for you, you assume that it hasn't been for anyone?

Is that sloppy thinking or narcissism?

I'm sorry that you feel I have "misrepresented" your views. But when you write that the "very fact that LL has decided that this forum, in its current form, presents no value to itself or its 'paying' customer base," you certainly seem to be buying into the argument that the forums are nothing more than a corporate "asset" that can be assessed only with reference to the little black numbers in the ledger book that appear next to its entry. Perhaps you can clarify for me?

With regard to the larger issue of "misrepresentation," I would be interested to know where you see "hysterics" in my post. Or is this merely another instance of that ever-handy use of a highly gendered term of derision to dismiss without ado any contributions with which you happen to disagree? Please point to me those passages in which I seem "hysterical," and reassure me, while you are at it, please, that you have not employed this term merely because I am a woman.


I suppose we may have to agree to disagree on this point. Looking over this forum daily, as I have for the last year at least, I have seen no shortage of people directly assisted by answers from knowledgeable residents here. What is more, I apparently see "intangible" value where you do not: I know that I have learned an astonishing amount in my time posting and reading here, without having posted more than a half dozen actual "questions" in that time.


And yet surely this is what SL Answers is for? Those who want quick and easy answers to simple questions may well be better advised to hunt there, although I think we are fairly adept as well at providing succinct advice and assistance when that seems called for. The fact that many of our responses and general discussions here are frequently more in-depth than is possible in SLA hardly makes them less "valuable." I think you underestimate SL residents if you believe, as you seem to be implying, that they can neither handle nor want anything more 10 second sound bytes in the response to questions and issues that are, in fact, often very complex indeed.

Whether it's sloppy thinking or not is probably a moot point.

As for narcissim;

Am I say that as a common member of the "prodigious number" I found no value?

Or

Am I saying that I'm separate and special from the "prodigious number" ?

Am I arrogant enough to believe I'm speaking for all men, or simply so arrogant that I believe my opinion is the only one that counts?

Aye, it's a dilemma and I'm on the horns of it alright.

Once you figure out that SLA is supposed to be the SL equivalent of Yahoo Answers, it makes more sense. You don't follow "threads" at Yahoo Answers. You jump in and answer someone's questions and move on. Or you ask your own, get an answer in what is usually a reasonable amount of time, and move on. It is great for questions and answers, lousy for any kind of larger discussion.

Yahoo answers also works for certain types of people. I've asked a few questions there where I've done my own research and not found the answer I was looking for, but gotten it within a couple of hours on Yahoo Answers. In turn, I answer questions over there on topics that I'm close to expert level at. It is not, under any circumstances, a place for conversation or deep thought. It gets trolled on a fairly regular basis but is well moderated and troll questions are dispatched pretty quickly once reported. "Answers" formats work for things where someone doesn't want to spend two hours researching something and finding an answer. It's a whole lot easier to tap into someone who is an "expert" on the topic and get your answer.

The format works for its intended purpose. It is in no way a replacement for forums.