Monocular Disarrangement

My monocle fell into my tea just recently, upon my opening my copy of the evening edition of the Linden Times and seeing this piece announcing the demise of the (discursive sections of the) Forums. In the past I have expressed some scorn at the idea that this might happen, but I now take every word back.

In about a month we’ll be shutting down the following forums: “Bulletin Board”, “General Topics”, “The Sandbox”, “Land and Economy” and “In-world Political Science”. We’ll leave them as ‘read only’ so they can be searched for history.

In subsequent months we’ll continue to close Linden forums, including:

* Announcements along with Press and Events, both of which will be replaced by the Linden blog,
* Known Issues & Development Updates to be replaced by Support > Known Issues, and
* References and Policies, to be replaced by the knowledge base as it is expanded

Long Term Changes

* The knowledge base and blog will take on some of the responsibilities of many of the feedback and content creation forums.
* The Classifieds will be closed in favor of Resident advertising and portal sites such as those listed on http://secondlife.com/landing fashion/, the In-World Classifieds (which can also be found on the secondlife.com website).
* Inactive group sites have been culled as time goes by; we expect groups will have better asynchronous communication options within Second Life with the release of v1.12, so the groups forums will be closed within the next three months.

Fishing it out again and drying it on a napkin, I reflected that of course there were certain issues that one might consider that made the forum format, as it were, not ideal. The one which seems to be concerning the Linden Family the most, according to the piece in question, is that of scalability, whether it is practical to have one set of forums which can entertain the whole of the community of Second Life as it grows. For myself I thought that the Forums were doing reasonably well on that front, as well as could be expected given that very few people actually bother to read forums, but hey ho, I don't make these decisions.

The issue is of course that, once the closure of the discursive areas is complete (and I suspect that extraneous discussion in the remaining areas will be curtailed) there will be no central area for residents of Second Life to discuss matters beyond the technical. Relatively little-travelled they might have been, but I can assure anyone that they were more travelled than any other forums related to Second Life on the Aethernet. Long exposure to and experience of the "blogosphere" (dread word!) has taught me that, without sufficient common functionality such as trackback, which is still not possessed across the board, communication and grouping is very difficult, and it never, ever reaches the same level as on an actual forum, where one person's post is as prominent as another's. Certain people's journals become dominant, and others find it very hard to be noticed. Community is decidedly lacking. The best blending of individual journalising and community discussion that I have seen is on Livejournal, but not everyone will wish to become part of that, and it is still hardly perfect.

I am not entirely sure of course what kind of further developments we can expect from Laboratoire Linden - some were hinted at in the article, such as the "asynchronous communication options" mentioned above - but clearly in this state of ignorance it behooves us as residents to make the best of matters. I would, for a start, encourage anyone not in possession of some sort of RSS reader to become acquainted with one immediately, be it an Aethernet service such as Bloglines or Google Reader, or something along the lines of Firefox's Live Bookmarks or perhaps a separate program altogether. Should I have any further thoughts I shall of course record them here.