{"id":2639,"date":"2013-01-21T19:26:44","date_gmt":"2013-01-21T19:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=2639"},"modified":"2013-01-21T19:26:44","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T19:26:44","slug":"second-life-general-discussion-turning-into-schoolyard-farce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=2639","title":{"rendered":"Second Life General Discussion Turning Into Schoolyard Farce"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t use the Second Life Forums<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The creation forums<\/a> are generally good and full of helpful advice. The merchants area<\/a> is an area of healthy and vibrant discussion with some spiky threads and healthy disagreement. The technology forums<\/a> are full of good information and whereas people can disagree, there’s good participation from Lindens there, which make it more useful. General discussion<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Second Life has traditionally attracted an older user base than the average MMO, so I’d wager that many of the participants are well past their teenage years. However in General Discussion we see threads on people being bullied, with evidence of harassment in the https:\/\/my.secondlife.com\/<\/a> stream to boot and then threads created in General Discussion which clearly link to childish squabbles in said stream and they sit there, with the moderators apparently happy to let them sit there.<\/p>\n

Generally I’m in the sticks and stones camp, if we had a younger audience it would be different as you get into safeguarding territory, which is one of the reasons I wasn’t happy about the teens coming in but they are few and far between. I do think some people should grow thicker skins and ignore the trolling, there are far more important things in life.<\/p>\n

What would be useful however would be for someone like former Lindens, Lexie or Amanda, to bang some heads together in General Discussion and tell people, especially those with an Advisor or Helper rank, to behave themselves and stop acting so childishly. Unfortunately we don’t have a Lexie or Amanda anymore, more’s the pity.<\/p>\n

Healthy disagreement is good, bullying, griefing and trolling really isn’t. Having to get an event organiser to apologise for events beyond their control and they weren’t part of, also isn’t good. Linden Lab should not have to deal with these issues, however they can deal with them and really, for the sake of the General Discussion forum, they should. I may not be a fan of the forums anymore, but I do believe a General Discussion area can serve a useful purpose, but it needs some community loving from Linden Lab.<\/p>\n

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