At Last! News (sort of) on a "new" General Discussion / RA Forum

I am pretty sure there will be some kind of "general" discussion area, whether it's called that or called something else. Our only concern with those is that they so often devolve into flame wars, either of us, or of Residents flaming each other. I do appreciate that sometimes people ask questions and get responses that are not satisfactory, but if the response then is to escalate things into abuse, it makes that kind of venue less attractive. We certainly recognize the value of free brainstorming, and we're looking at how a revised forum structure can best support that, and help avoid nastiness.

Yes. Thus the repeated call by residents for the ability to put people on a mute/ignore list.


As was asked before, why not just copy the existing forums structure.

Lindens have made it clear, over and over and over, that they're not interested in participating in the forums so why don't you just do what the actual users are used to?

Thank you! This is indeed encouraging.

I agree that flame wars and general nastiness are to be avoided if at all possible; they certainly are not conducive to real discussion. But to some extent such things are a function of all online blog / forum culture: it's going to happen, whatever safeguards are put into place. I think that you need only look at the skirmishes that erupt now on SL Answers, not to mention some of the posts here and in other SL Feature blogs, for proof of that. Nor do I think that the old forums were any more prone to that kind of thing than anywhere else I've visited; in fact, compared to the third-party forums, the RA forum is a perpetual love-in!

I hope that whatever "structural" features you put in place to prevent general nastiness do not end up restricting the free flow of ideas too dramatically.

Good to hear you think there will be a general discussion area, but I do not quite think there will be the level of flames you expect.

Are there flames in pretty much any discussion about anything? Sure, whether it is a blog, a forum, or figuring out whose turn it is to do the dishes.

There seem to be two basic types of flames:

Resident v resident flames: miniscule compared to the amount of words posted on the forum.

Resident v LL flames: usually they grow larger by LL not being a participant in the discussion.

Do I expect a company to watch every post in every thread on their official communications channel(s)? No (although some do and people praise the customer service in return). I do expect them to pop in at times: if there are 100 people motivated enough to ask the same question dozens of times each and the company shows no response (or restates the party line over and over again) no matter how long the thread gets of COURSE the people on the thread will flame the company.

I'll believe it when I see it about a general discussion area, nearly everything in the original blog posts and the initial comments from Lindens suggested there was no room for general discussion, not least the way the question has been skirted by every Linden responding here.

The forums are being migrated on Tuesday and you don't know the structure? Seriously?

This is tentatively good news . . . maybe?

/me tentatively whoops and dances

Wallace isn't really on the decision making panel on this, Blue and Lexie are. Lexie seems to think resident answers and SL Answers is a perfect fit and on Blue's initial blog post he said:

"More Focus: As part of the transition, we're removing some redundant forums and streamlining others, so you can more easily find the information you're looking for. We want the forums to be about conversations with a purpose; to that end, we're paring down to some of the most focused forums, and letting other conversations continue off-site, or even better: inworld. The forums have become jammed with cruft over the years, and we'll be paring down to a smaller number of top-level forums to make it easier to find the conversations you're looking for."

They really don't want a general discussion area. Whether they'll retreat and at least start attmepting to meet residents halway over these migrations remains to be seen but Scylla you have asked several times for a straight answer and nobody is prepared to give you one.

I would wager that you're going to be disappointed. Sorry. I should hand my pom-poms over to you. I'll go get them out of the dumpster. I didn't realize there would be someone left to hand them to.

In any case, I'm keep my fingers crossed. Of course, the next question is, if we DO get a general discussion area, will it be functional?

Give me an R!
Give me an A!

What does THAT spell???

RA RA RESIDENT ANSWERS!

Give me an R!
Give me an A!

What does THAT spell???

RA RA RESIDENT ANSWERS!

From what I gather on these forums, the only reason Resident Answers is really a general discussion area is because it evolved into one. The absence of Linden interference probably helped that evolution. They deleted the true general discussion forum here years ago.

Hi Wallace, I'm really pleased that a general discussion area is at least being seriously considered. An ignore/mute button and some light moderation should prevent most flamewars. It doesn't need to cost - we had some great resmods at the old forums, who even now respond to reported posts and lock threads when needed, even though they are completely unsupported by the Lindens. People will do it for love if you give them a space they feel is truly theirs. You really, really need a "report bad post" button here though. If you go ahead and give us a RA-like space, please allow time for all the strong personalities from both venues to settle down and get used to each other - things may be a little heated to start with as a new "pecking order" is established.I am concerned that you'll give us this space and at the first sign of willy-waving you'll declare it a failure and close it. Mod it heavily to start with, if necessary, but please give it time to settle down and mature.

As far as people dissing LL goes, well, that's going to happen, to a greater or lesser extent anyway - even if you all bent over backwards to keep us happy (ha!). You're the ones with all the power and it's as natural as people grumbling about their bosses or kids moaning about their parents and teachers. The logical solution is to keep it safely behind a login and not try to use a community resource as a form of advertising for hypothetical customers ... hey, here's an idea ... what about using "advertising" to advertise instead? I know it's a radical suggestion but I hear it works for quite a few companies

On the other hand, I can quite see that without Google it's next to impossible to find anything on these blogs, so perhaps that's your reasoning. Speaking of Google, one thing that really concerns me is the public indexing of the old forums. There's a wealth of valuable info there which of course should be made available, but I don't see why it all has to be publicly accessible to non-residents. Many of us have bared our souls over there during the last few years, knowing that anybody reading would at least have a Second Life frame of reference for what we were saying. Suddenly all of this is to become accessible to anybody via any public search engine. Many of us feel betrayed. You could leave the old forums exactly as they are, with a login - just disable the ability for anybody to make new posts - easy peasy

They really don't want a general discussion area.

BTW, what does "jammed with cruft" even mean?

BTW, what does "jammed with cruft" even mean?

Is evasiveness a job requirement for working at Linden Lab? It's like they all live in Dilbert's world.

To be fair, there are some cobwebs in the darker corners of the subforums. See, e.g., .

You might think so, but Blue could not possibly comment.