Whilst somewhat re-enabled in Aethernet terms, I am still unable to enter the Grid itself, and have been attempting to ameliorate the symptoms of my withdrawal with such things as the Scripting Section of the Official Forums.
To tell the truth I have been there infrequently of late. Previously I would spend many hours bickering over semicolons, but I have found it drawing me less and less in recent months until I barely ever participate unless at an extremely loose end. I am not entirely sure what caused this change; perhaps it was the closure of many parts of it and the enforcement of apparently somewhat arbitary conditions, making the place far less welcoming as a whole, or perhaps there was some Social Shift, with either the tenor of new participants changing or the departure of those I previously enjoyed engaging with. Or, perhaps, it is entirely down to a change in my own character.
One thing that most definitely has put me off ever returning, or at least offering actual Script-Code Solutions, is the current impossibility of posting up any sort of Code in any sort of Legible Form. I fear that I became infuriated by this and vowed never to return, or at least never to attempt to put up examples again. This is yet another manifestation of the dread [#WEB-156] BBCode not working on official SL Forums, one the annoyance of which I had not fully appreciated (and believe me, I have been incredibly annoyed by it already). This one thing now makes the huge Scripting Library unreadable and greatly discourages any further contributions, as well as vastly increasing the effort required to actually help anyone with their own problems or post solutions. Short queries and functions and theoretical discussions are bearable, but the prospect of struggling through some poor novice's hundred lines of unformatted code in order to chase down curly brackets is enough to make one simply not bother.
{}?
It all infuriates me even more as there are dozens of people eager to help with this, perhaps the most opaque skill within Second Life for a beginner or Non-Technical Sort to deal with, yet they face obstacles which even have the effect of making previous stored advice less valuable. A grid full of professional Old Resident engineers, lonely newer auto-didacts and terrible ancient scripts handed down from generation to generation due to the lack of anything more recent and efficient is not the sort of vision I have ever had, and discussion and mutual education at least goes some way to preventing this dystopia and helping the broadest group and greatest number of people. Even if one has no intention of dirtying one's hands with any sort of Coding, one may still benefit from proper samples to be cut and pasted directly into an In-World Device.
As a small sticking-plaster I have now set up my own Scripting Colloquium, where one might post Code in a manner which can actually be Read (as well as Images and Links and Things In Italics and So On). These things rarely survive for more than a few weeks, and it may die an undignified death, but I would encourage anyone with scripts and questions about scripts who is put off discussion within the Official Forums by this or other matters to visit and participate. At the least it may build up some useable examples.
