What's in store for the website?

The explanation for the turning off of BB code in the forums is:


Anyone heard anything from the rumor mill about what it is that's in store for the web site? I know the quoted passage says that more info can't be divulged but I suspect it's unlikely that some Linden hasn't leaked a bit of info to some non-Linden.

Anyone know why the BB code would need to be turned off?

Are we going to lose all the links or all the BB code from all the forum posts permanently?

ive never known any reason that BBCode would be totally shut off for an upgrade, i do know it makes the scripting forums total hell tho

I am going to give an experience that happened on another Forum, that I won't name. Things were getting a bit like they are here a little wild, General and Ot were Combat Zones...what Fun . The owner of the forum/Product developer was under constant attack for offenses both real and imagined. One day the Forum was gone. This was also a small company so some thought they pulled the plug. 3 weeks went by before a notice appeared at the adress reporting a massive crash, corrupted data, possible hack, barbarians at the gate situation, and to get ready for the "New Improved" Forum. About a week later a shiny new forum appears. No OT. No General. SEVERLY moderated, the slightest deviation could result in summary post and or thread deletion, suspension, and banning, without explanation. A ton of useful FAQ's and stickies gone due to, unability to recover Data, no backup was in place. I never went back. Made a lot of friends there, who I have never heard from again, as they just left as well without notice. I'm not implying anything, jsut a little bedtime story.

perhaps my.secondlife.com is coming soon to a web server near you.

I hope it doesn't turn into a chaotic AJAXy mess with mouseover popups everwhere (that will probably not work in the Opera browser).

Sigh, best copy any posts you find useful or otherwise worth keeping.

My Guess is they are getting rid of this old format And replacing it with a Flash version ....with a new sky

That was the original SL URL from early beta, I think. They used to give noobs a t-shirt with that URL on the front.

Perhaps its being replaced by Jira.Secondlife.com
...
......

Maybe they have to get forum age verification integrated.

What i don't understand is why work and so do these little smilies and the damn thing puts around any http links automatically but they don't work. Hmm let me show you... I'm not typing in these bracketed urls in the following line...

http://www.secondlife.com

Don't know the answers to these questions, Suezanne, but as one who
runs a few bulletin boards, the explanation doesn't make any sense unless
they're planning to do a migration, which I doubt.

The result of turning off bbcode is a mess visually. Further, I find it rather
disappointing LL didn't take the time to inform everyone of this change
proactively. Not surprising though.

In the short time I've been on these forums, I've seen them closed one by one.
My gut feeling is that LL would like these forums to go away. Resident Answers
is the last remaining "open discussion" area Linden Lab offers its residents.

On the official blog they're shutting down discussions at 100 posts if allowed
at all.

Along with the recent change to support which added hurdles, it seems
like LL is attempting to build a secure Green Zone between itself
and it's residents.

/me whistling in the dark...

- Infrared

I asked Torley about this yesterday at her office but she didn't have any more info..

I reckon they're going to narrow the width of the text part to 1/3 your normal screen or 1/4 of a wide screen like they did to the blogs to make room for advertising down the sides

from: http :// forums.nexcess.net/archive/index.php?t-596.html

i note from the foot of the page that LL is using vbulletin v3.0.5.

could it be that they're simply preparing to upgrade the forums to v3.0.6? if true, they left it a little late. that security bulletin was posted two and a half years ago.

In their 'infinite wisdom' they removed General, OT and Linden Answers forums. In the absence of those, when something like Daniel's blog entry happens people want to discuss it somewhere, so Resident Answers is it. LL have been distancing itself from the residents bit by bit and it comes down to them wanting our money but not wanting to listen to us at all.

Fictional Quote of Some Mighty Linden:



Offical forums give residents a place... the LAST place really... to communicate with Linden Labs. Linden Labs, being very interested in adopting a See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil mentality as much as corporately possible in regards to its clients/customers/residents, finds communication messy at best, annoying at worse, and are probably trying to figure out how to dismiss these forums entirely, as quietly as possible.

First one feature of them wont work, then another, then maybe there will be some "massive hack" that will completely erase the database from the beginning, then, because it will really just be too much work and possible even a (gasp) security breech, Linden Labs, in its herculen efforts to keep it's residents 'safe' will decide it's in the best interest of the community to simply close these forums.

We, after all, as thier children, should be seen (in massive numbers to delight the corporate sponsors) and NOT heard.

I've long imagined that LL wants to retain the control they have on the LL forums while disallowing anything of significance to be written.

If they closed forums.secondlife, people would go to third party sites. As long as some bare minimum of function remains here, that motivation is lessened.

This is mere speculation based on little evidence, but I see "nerfing" the forums as yet another link in that chain. The changes they've made with the recent BBCode limiting *with no explanation at all* is disingenuous at best: "we've made formating not work and hyperlinks fugly, but QUOTE still works and we're not telling you why" appears no other thing to me than a PR machine out of control. Perhaps the next iteration of the forums will be Mono based.

The forums already occupy only part of the screen on my system:

I buy monitors as big as I can afford to so that I can read the text without having to get some kind of super-powered binocular/telescope glasses ,and what does the world do -it decides that web pages need fonts that are only 6 pixels high and layouts that use only a third of the screen. If there is a super-being running the universe, it's obviously not a benevolent one.

Mercifully Opera's page zoom works quite well on the forums. The use of the sidebars on the Linden blog page renders that impossible. Note to people writing page zoom code: zoom from the center out, not from the left edge.

I submitted the secondlife.com domain to an accessibility review organization, I don't know that any action ever occurred. Possibly looking at secondlife.com put the accessibility review staff into comas; might need to check on them and see if they are ok.

Someone said they may be upgrading to 3.0.6 of VB.

I've used vbulletin for years (favorite forum software hehe) And i'm going to have to say I doubt it.


VB doesn't require bb codes turned off to upgrade in anyway. Besides 3.6.7 is out

The only thought I could come up with is they're moving over to another forum software.

If they are seriously just upgrading VB and turned it off for that reason they need to smack their forum dev in the head and ask why it was necessary because its most definately not.

As for quote working and smilies - those aren't bb code.

The worst thread in RA is civil and courteous compared to the average flame-fest ridden second citizen thread. The other third-party forums I know of are rarely frequented.

There just isn't a replacement for the official forums, and while RA degenerated over time, the content forums are still an invaluable source of help and information for a lot of people.

I wonder if we will lose the links permanently. LL gutted the attachments that documented the early history of "our world"; are they now going to make threads that depend on links as useless as all the uploaded images of SL's early days?

The links will always be there even if bb code is removed (even if the url code is removed) It just won't show up as a hyperlink anymore.

Course that's assuming they dont gut out a crapload of the forum hehe.

I actually just noticed that the SL History Wiki doesnt have any previous versions of the TOS anymore (my short-term memory is obliterated, but didn't they used to list every version of it as it came out?) but instead just has a link to the current TOS.

Doesn't seem to provide much of a history that way, huh?

me, on page 1.

yes, but if the bbcode in vbulletin 3.0.5 is deemed a security risk (and according to the quote below it is), it would make sense for it to be turned off until an upgrade has taken place.

from: http :// forums.nexcess.net/archive/index.php?t-596.html

If you noticed the date that was released it was two years ago... If that was still the case in this forum it'd of been exploited way before now

So i'm going to bank on that isn't the case. Unless SL has just been insanely lucky ^^