The official SL forums are dead to me. In a not unexpected but still disappointing turn of events, Linden Lab has chosen to kill off the forums. Many reasons given, but none felt completely honest. The shift toward third party forums already had some momentum, but for many of us, the official forums remained a virtual piazza where we could wander and mingle. Despite having shifted attention toward my preferred third party forum, I still posted regularly to the official SL forums. This has come to an abrupt end and has resulted in the vivification of this very blog, which I had previously left as a skeletal dead space in the wreckage of the web.
The Lab is fast becoming notorious for the sort of strategic gambit that feels like a slap in the face to long-time customers but which they feel will give them a leg up in their never ending grope for padded account statistics. I don't really blame them for seeking success on their terms, but it seemed those forums had value for the community at large. This value, in my opinion, outweighed the negatives of a few malcontent posters or the effort LL would need to exert to maintain the forums (as they didn't but much effort in to-date).
The new SL Blog is something that doesn't interest me. Besides the obvious fact that blogs are boring to most people, it creates another level of interference for me in keeping up with the SL community. LL is distancing themselves from their customer base even further. The Lab has never been a top notch provider of customer service, failing to respond in any meaningful way to users' cries for help. They have now made turning a blind eye the official policy. Good for them. Straight-forward business practices are something to be proud of.
I can still be found posting at SecondCitizen.com* with an entertaining and bright crowd of people that is getting more diverse at this very moment thanks to LL. For now, I can still be found inworld, but as the supplications for money mount on a daily basis from people I don't know (and in barely coherent netspeak), I grow more weary of the Future of the Metaverse that LL is creating under my virtual feet.
*Other great third party sites exist, most notably SLUniverse.com, but SC is the most user friendly for me at work and is my default at the moment.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Life in the space. Whichever one I'm in at the moment.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
1 comment:
I didn't post frequently on the SL forums besides the New Products area, but I did read through them periodically. It was one place where you could go when bug reports and live help IMs got you know where to discuss your woes. It was where I would go to see if other users were having the same troubles. It was where I hoped LL was keeping an eyeball on to hear are cries.
The Design and Textures area has so much helpful information to newcomers interested in fashion design as well as tips that even a proficient Photoshopper can avail from. These content creation areas seem up in the air right now. I think it's a huge mistake to get rid of them as other formats don't allow users to really ask how to questions and get resident answers.
Even with all the drama, the rest of the forums were useful as well. Scanning through let me get a feel for the various community viewpoints on a wide range of subjects. Sure, many of them were beaten to death, but still I learned stuff and got a chuckle at many of the witty posts.
The forums were a place to keep watch for things happening in SL: events, problems, moral dilemmas, developments, possibilites, etc. I hope LL will manage to pull off a better channel of communicating with us, but as for us communicating with eachother, I dont see how referring to a zillion other blogs will help. It's too much to keep track of.
The upside? It made you bring your blog to life. I have a lot of respect for you and have always enjoyed your "mouth words". :P So, YAY!
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