{"id":551,"date":"2010-02-01T20:39:59","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T20:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=551"},"modified":"2014-01-12T13:17:18","modified_gmt":"2014-01-12T13:17:18","slug":"forums-to-be-nerfed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=551","title":{"rendered":"Forums To Be Nerfed"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Upgrading the forums<\/strong>” shouts the blog headline, as Linden Lab announce that they’re, well upgrading the forums<\/strong>, as you can read here<\/a>. However having used the new forum software for some time, both inside and outside of the Second<\/strong> Life<\/strong> experience I have to say, the technology may be considered an upgrade but the experience often isn’t.<\/p>\n

When the Xstreet forums<\/strong> closed people complained that they were losing a community, the commerce forums<\/strong> are a very pale shadow of the old Xstreet forums<\/strong>. People do not find the clearspace platform as user friendly and this isn’t just a complaint from Second<\/strong> Life<\/strong> users, I saw the same complaints when Frontrange closed their old forums<\/strong> and moved the platform to clearspace, some people who used to post on the old forum never migrated across and the same will happen here.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The warning signs are there that Linden Lab aren’t interested in the current community who use the forums<\/strong>, it’s exemplified in comments like this:<\/p>\n

“More Focus: As part of the transition, we’re removing some redundant forums<\/strong> and streamlining others, so you can more easily find the information you’re looking for. We want the forums<\/strong> to be about conversations with a purpose; to that end, we’re paring down to some of the most focused forums<\/strong>, and letting other conversations continue off-site, or even better: inworld. The forums<\/strong> have become jammed with cruft over the years, and we’ll be paring down to a smaller number of top-level forums<\/strong> to make it easier to find the conversations you’re looking for.”<\/p>\n

This to me cries out that Resident Answers has no place in the hierachy, indeed it seems that what many feared, SL Answers where conversation is actively discouraged will be seen as the replacement and this theory is lent weight by Yoz Linden’s promotion of SL Answers:<\/p>\n

“Since launching Clearspace last year we’ve made plenty of tweaks to the new system, many of them based on Resident feedback. Second<\/strong> Life<\/strong> Answers, a new custom forum helping Residents to help each other, recently passed over 500k 600k (!) total page views. Soon we’ll be upgrading to the latest version of Jive SBS (the new name for Clearspace) with many improvements, and implementing features such as formatted signatures, staff comment highlighting, and integration with our new single-sign-on system.”<\/p>\n

Then we have someone suggesting that comments should be limited per day and set to a certain length and Lexie calls it an interesting suggestion and suggests the person opens a Jira, a Jira on limiting free speech? Way to go! This really is not sounding encouraging at all.<\/p>\n

We knew this was going to happen, that the forums<\/strong> would be migrated but some of the worst fears that they’d be totally nerfed<\/strong> do look like they’re going to come true. Linden Lab have a habit of valuing the opinion of those who don’t use the service above those who do, it’s an interesting but puzzling strategy.<\/p>\n

The proof will obviously be in the pudding, the evidence of the Xstreet migration isn’t encouraging but SL Answers does serve a purpose. There are several usability issues with the current implementation of clearpsace, navigation for a start, lack of consistency, slow loading, default preferences set to email all responses, people using different views, either threaded or flat which leads to some people quoting previous posts and some people not seeing the need as it’s directly below, the lack of ease to find all posts by a certain user, lack of support for Opera yadda yadda yadda. I’m sure all of these can be ironed out, I’m sure new people will come along and think it’s all wonderful, life<\/strong> will go on, but an upgrade is certainly not how this feels at this moment in time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Upgrading the forums” shouts the blog headline, as Linden Lab announce that they’re, well upgrading the forums, as you can read here. However having used the new forum software for some time, both inside and outside of the Second Life experience I have to say, the technology may be considered an upgrade but the experience … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Forums To Be Nerfed”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,14,647],"tags":[128,1022],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6rJUK-8T","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3523,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions\/3523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}