I don’t use the Second Life Forums as much as I once did, many reasons for that, the first being that the forums lost their charm when Linden Lab decided to ditch Resident Answers and move from real forum software to an all singing, all dancing, more than a forum software. Since then they’ve moved onto a second version of all singing, all dancing, more than a forum software and it’s still rather cack to me, but these things happen. People who used the really old forums didn’t like the transition to the version of the forums I enjoyed.
The creation forums are generally good and full of helpful advice. The merchants area is an area of healthy and vibrant discussion with some spiky threads and healthy disagreement. The technology forums are full of good information and whereas people can disagree, there’s good participation from Lindens there, which make it more useful. General discussion is an area where you’d think you’d gone back in time to the days when you were at school, with obvious cliques, trolling, flame bait and what seems to be bullying. I refrain from calling it outright bullying because I don’t know if there’s some sort of forum cartel at play feigning injury in order to whip up discussion.
The really sad thing though is that some of the participants in these playground antics have forum ranks of Helper or Advisor, they are supposedly responsible residents and yet they are fully engaged in these silly antics, which quite frankly they should be embarrassed about.
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