Clarification

Clarification is never a bad thing.  Part of LL’s justification for closing the forums was the ’signal to noise’ ratio being too much for the poor little resmods to handle.  Well what’s the surprise there?  If you can’t handle the job, you either get a different job with the same company, or find another job with a different company.  If the company can’t handle the workload, you employ more people, and make sure they are well trained.

It’s not rocket science.  It’s what successful companies have been doing for hundreds of years.  Yet, instead of using time-honoured techniques for company management, Linden Lab simply decide to close down most fo the useful part of the forums.  Since when was closing down the company the best solution for an increased workload?

When companies have temporary workload increases, they might outsource part of it or hire temps, rather than spending lots of money on increasing the building size and buying new equipment.   Again, standard management techniques.  But no, Linden Lab decide once more to ignore what everyone else does, and just shut them down.

Then they give us the “Linden Blog”.  Contrary to popular belief, although I dislike blogs, they do have their place in allowing Linden employees to let us know what they’re working on, and to ask for our input at times.  But essentially, it’s just an online diary, somewhere for them to tell us what they want us to hear, without any real need to hear back what we have to say unless they specifically ask us (by turning on comments).  We can’t ask Random Linden how such-and-such a project is going, or whether this new tool is likely to be in a forthcoming release – because we can’t start a thread.

This is the main reason I don’t like blogs.  They’re sanitised, generally rather boring, and not an effective two-way communication tool.

So, my “SLAB” (Second Lifers Against Blogs) campaign is focused purely on getting Linden Lab to acknowledge that the forums, for all their faults (although mostly due too poor management) did at least allow residents to talk to each other, as well as Linden <> resident communication.

Without a central, official forum, you only get fragmentation, and a further distillation of voice amongst – at the last count – over 30 third party user run forums (Stratics, Second Citizen, SL Universe, SLHomepage, SLForum etc etc etc).

Second Life has no community.  It has groups of communities and cliques that do their own thing, and rarely communicate.  Goreans hate furries.  Furries hate goths.  Goths hate blingtards.  Blingtards hate ageplayers.  Ageplayers hate…. you get the idea.

With the forums, although there was of course disagreement, most people could put their group affiliations to one side and discuss issues without getting too bogged down into who was saying it instead of what was being said.  I’ve made some quite unlikely friends through the forum, including a transsexed vampire and a satanist… who are able to put aside what I am, and take me as who I am, and we get on just fine.

Essentially, SL is still “Philips Baby”, but I see no clear management structure at Linden Lab that’s capable of taking SL forward to be a profitable, functional company, with a reliable product to sell.  Whilst no doubt it’s a great company to work for – after all, who wouldn’t want to work somewhere when you can more or less do what you want, when you want, and get to send ‘love’ round the office for a job well done.  Funny that last one, every other job I’ve ever heard of , your reward for ‘a job well done’ was a pay packet at the end of the month and employment for the next month.

I know I’m not the only one who cares about wanting the forums back – prop 1781 was quite clear, and bought to the attention of King Phil himself at the last town hall – and a look through Linden Answers will tell you that many people are not happy with being forced over here to remember yet another login password. 

The need for the return of the forums is clear.  The desire amongst the active playerbase is clear.  All we need is for Linden Lab to get their head out of the sand and listen. 

Lewis