New Community Platform launched

The new Community Platform launched today. The layout is clean and fresh and in keeping with the rest of the revised SL website.  Torley has produced one of his ever-impressive videos to help introduce the platform:

This is needed, as some of the elements of the platform are not entire intuitive. Take adding an avatar picture for example. Once logged in, there is an option at the top of the screen called My Settings. Within this is a tab called Avatars. One would think this is the place to upload and select an avatar picture for go alongside your posts.

Wrong.

While you can indeed select an avatar from My Settings->Avatars, you in fact have to upload any image you wish to use from your profile first. Your Community Platform profile, that is. This requires that you click on your name at the top of the Community pages then click on Upload Images (/View image for, once you’ve uploaded the first time) then upload a picture then go to My Settings -> Avatars to select and use it.

And if you want to get a background for your avatar picture, it is even more confusing, as you need to play around with the Social Connect tab of My Settings.

And if you want to use a custom background (such as the one on the left) – it gets harder, as nowhere is the required size of the background given. This means that you have to fiddle about guessing the relative size of the background – and the “preview” option in Social Connect is as useful as a chocolate tea kettle as it is not representative of the background’s size when used in forum posts…

Friendly, huh? I eventually got the image on the left to work after well over 30 minutes of pissing playing around with images, and the required size appears to be 117(w) x 210(h) pixels.

None of this gets the new platform off to a user-friendly start – and this is reflected in the fact that the first questions lined up in the new Answers section of the Platform are about … setting up forum avatar pictures…

Elsewhere, LL seem to have blundered yet again. Back when the Jive-based blogrum was launched, a glaring omission was that of a General Discussion forum. This lead to people being confused as to where to chat and, well, be a community. It also lead to some pretty heavy-handed moderation on the part of Linden Labs which at times – it has to be said – was very biased in its approach: threads critical of LL were rapidly shut down by LL staff as being “inappropriate” for the forum in which they were posted, while other threads with a more positive attitude towards LL were allowed to run unhindered, despite also technically being in the “wrong” forum topic area.

Well…guess what is missing from the new forums? Yup: there is no General Discussions area. Of course, the JIVE blogrum did get a GD eventually – but you would have thought someone in LL, staff churn or not, would have remembered what happened before and learned a lesson. True, the JIVE-based GD got to be a pretty unpleasant environment  – but discussion is what makes a community, and without a GD area, the new Community Platform has a big hole in it – and it is already causing mass confusion, with GD topics turning up in both the Entertainment and Your Avatar sections.

I’m not altogether sure how I’ll like the new layout – if I use it that much, I’m now far too at home over at SLU. The general approach seems good, allowing for the obscure route you need to take to get a good-looking forum avatar sorted out;  page layouts are going to take a while to get used to. Certainly, the lack of a clear-cut GD environment is going to lead to a lot of confusion as to where people should post, and LL need to sort this out now rather than leave it – or go back to stomping on threads for being “inappropriate” for the sections they show up in.

More guidelines need to be built-into the system as well: Torley’s video is good at giving a broad overview, but really, the system could do with around two or three more.

It’s also going to be interesting to see how long LL staff remain engaged on the Platform once the sense of Shiny has worn off of it for them. In that respect, I’m rather surprised that there isn’t a section entitled “Ask a Linden” or “Ask the Lab”, or some such – together with clear and concise guidelines – that encourages two-way communications between users and LL representatives. After all, this platform is about improving communications and providing channels of communication, is it not?