Events Forum Arrives, Web Classifieds Vanish

Two items to talk about, one potentially very good, one potentially not so good. Let’s start with the good, it appears that Linden Lab have finally started to listen to me and have introduced a new forum on the official forums, that is Events! Wait wait, didn’t they already have an Events forum? No, not quite, they have an Event Producers forum, which is a place to discuss best practices, the new Events forum looks like it’s a place for posting …. events!

Why is this good (besides it being my suggestion … which may make some wonder what LL are smoking!) well, it gives users another avenue to post events, it has the potential for people to find out more about events that are running and therefore find out more about the activities that take place in Second Life.

Wait, they can already do that with the events system that already exists. This is true but, new events posted to the events forum will appear in the recently created thread list for a while, which can catch people’s eyes and people browsing that forum can see events that they didn’t realise were happening, because they’d never have searched for them, it’s a nice way of finding out which events are running, if people use the forum.

Howevere there is a word of caution to be applied here, nobody from Linden Lab has officially stated what usage this forum has, I’ve noticed some official Linden events and a couple of resident posted events, I have posted one myself. They could be deleted and Linden Lab could state that’s not the purpose of that forum, but as there’s already an event producers forum, it would seem odd if this forum wasn’t for posting events, unless Linden Lab are the only people allowed to post events, in which case they shouldn’t let us peons create new threads!

I’m hoping this will grow into a useful resource and will be free of the repeat events that blight the inworld events system, indeed I encourage you to give it a whirl because at the very least it gives your event the opportunity to gain more reach, just ensure your event isn’t adult, I’m pretty sure adult events won’t be allowed!

Now the bad news, and again it’s related to reach. Web Profiles, I noticed recently picks and classifieds were not showing if you were not logged in. I didn’t think too much about this as it makes sense to me whilst we still have adult picks and profiles and no way of flagging them, seriously, please, let folk maturity rate their profiles and picks! Anyway, whilst using the Jira I noticed a Jira from Gracie Goldflake, Jira-SVC-6883 – In the new web profiles, where are my classified ads?

Hmm I’m sure they are, thought I, and wondered if Gracie wasn’t logged in, so I went to my own profile and whilst logged in noticed … my classifieds aren’t there! I swear they were there once, or maybe it was the old web profiles that had them, either way, classifieds are a paid service, picks are a free service and whereas I’m not objecting to picks being seen, I do think classified should be seen, indeed I’d say they should get more prominence than picks, as people are paying for them.

Now one theory could be that there is advertising space on those web profiles, and therefore Linden Lab want to sell advertising there, which would mean inworld classifieds are competing perhaps? However that would seem a tad churlish, and if people are getting click throughts from their inworld ads via web profiles, wouldn’t that be good? Wouldn’t that encourage people to spend more on classifieds?

I’d much rather see classifieds on web profiles than groups, classifieds are of course inworld classifieds, so it’s not like people are getting a raw deal, but making those inworld classifieds more valuable, is surely a good goal for Linden Lab to aim for, isn’t it?