The Second Life forums have over the years taken on various forms, each time they change a group of people pine for the older forum. Personally I don’t think they’ve ever recovered from the day that the forums running on forum software were replaced with the all singing, all dancing, extremely frustrating Jive, which in turn has been replaced by Lithium.
The not so secret but still private, merchants roundtable is currently as dead as a dodo, although there are older posts there from Darrius Gothly, which may soon become a collector’s item as Darrius is currently banned from the forums apparently, for crimes unknown to anyone other than the forum moderators. Darrius is a rather lively and informative contributor, so it’s a shame he can’t contribute right now, hopefully that will change soon.
However the current forums are a strange beast, you click on sections and see forums you never knew existed. I clicked on the creation forum link this evening, to find there’s a Building And Texturing Forum Knowledgebase Forum, which actually seems to be part of the knowledgebase section of the main site. The plot thickens though because the Building And Texturing Knowledgebase Forum is empty, completely blank, it’s sitting there all lonely and neglected.
What is this for? Does this forum really exist? Is it an addition to the Good Building Practices guide Jeremy Linden is working on? Is it supposed to exist? Has it been introduced into the world and forgotten? This sounds like it would be a useful section to exist, but will it ever be fully born?
Then we have things that are missing from the forums since the days the last proper forums closed down. There’s still no classified forum and there’s still no new products forum. Both of these would be useful. Cristiano Midnight manages to provide a classifieds forum over at SLUniverse. They aren’t abused from what I can see, they give people a chance to share upcoming events, new releases, commercial announcements etc. so it can be done.
The thing is, SLUniverse runs on software designed to run forums and it works well, the content isn’t to everyone’s taste, some of it being NSFW and the current moderators on the official forums would be rushed off their feet censoring some of the content, but in terms of structure, it beats the official forums hands down. Lindens do read the SLUniverse forums, so they can see the structure, which has sections that wouldn’t be suited to the Second Life Forums, but it also has sections that would improve the official forums, classifieds being a glaring one.
I’m not sure what the thinking was when LL took away classifieds, maybe it was that they want people to pay Linden Dollars to advertise inworld. However people did used to pay some eye watering sums for inworld classifieds when the old forums had a classifieds section and the old forums gave people an extra avenue with which to not only advertise their wares, but also to advertise what can be done in Second Life. The concept that those who supported taking away the classified section of the forums didn’t seem to fully grasp, was that browsing works as a form of advertising, at times it works better than searching, that’s why people advertise.
The Land Forum does pretty much have a classifieds section, it’s about time a general classifieds section was brought back.
One significant difference between SLU and the Official Forums, I think, is that all the SLU regulars accept that it’s Cristiano’s forum and he makes the rules. To my mind, this makes it possible for him to pursue a very aggressive moderation policy in the New Products subforum, to prevent it from being spammed with dozens of releases of the same item only in dfferent colours, and so on.
I think there though, there’s an issue of engagement. Maestro and Oskar before him were posting in their posts that off topic posts would be deleted in the server release forum and that semed to start working with regards to keeping them on topic.
The Lindens don’t generally engage in the forums, but you’re right to say people probably have different criteria for the official forums than they do SLU.
(warning: patented DG tl;dr follows)
Thank you for the compliments Ciaran. As an update, when I checked earlier this morning I had been un-banned and was able to once again post. I posted a question in the Feedback forum asking for a Mod to send me a PM explaining why I was banned. Honestly, if I was banned for a good reason, I’d like to make sure I don’t step across that line again. I’d rather add to the forums than subtract. (And my posting that question MAY have gotten me banned again, but I haven’t checked yet. LOL)
Your comments about the things missing from the current SL Forums are right on. I think a lot of the reason they are so under utilized is that the topics and purposes they should serve (such as the Classifieds and New Releases Forums of old) are missing. Those two would be excellent lures to bring many more people in .. and help them discover the other great resources that can be found there.
The number of people helped by posting their questions/concerns on the SL Forums could be greatly increased. A lot of issues we see posted are simple things that are rapidly answered by another SL User. This helps the Tech Support overload by answering the simple things without the need for a support ticket and all that involves.
But once again, the things we see as obvious and common sense .. seem to be those things that the admins at LL reject out of hand. Apparently their view of Second Life is completely different than ours.