Well, it’s been less that 24 hours, and already the forums in the new Community Platform are heading towards an Epic Fail.
As I noted yesterday, the new Platform fails to include a General Discussion topic area, recalling what happened by when the JIVE environment first came along.
It seems that in LL’s case, history does repeat itself: threads requesting a GD area have been closed off, with a message from Amanda Linden:
“Hey all, I wanted to address the “General Discussion” Forum question that has come up. Our goal with the Forums is to keep them as focused and constructive as possible. Although General Discussion no longer exists, we’re always happy to create new Forums when the need comes up. That’s where the Forum Feedback section is critical. We’ll be watching it closely and adding new topic-specific Forums over time.”
Yes, history does repeat itself. What’s worse, it reads as fudged censorship.
Over and above that, it has led to the forums rapidly turning into a mess of threads and discussions all over the currently assigned topic groups.
As something that is supposed to invite and encourage communications, I’d say things are off to a rough start, with many already dismissing the new Platform as little more than a means to discourage open discourse / any negativity about Linden Lab.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
Thing is they can not really avoid that a common board will form itself as people want it. Right now it looks like “Your Avatar” is poised for general usage :).
Looking at structure, colors, fonts, sizes, etc. it remains pretty much unusable from a pure interface point of view. Who had the idea to use different font sizes and scream in bold? Nitemare. Not interested to dig any deeper already. But that’s just me 🙂
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The layout is fine to me – everything where you can see it…or it started that way. Even now, with a few hundred posts, it’s starting to unravel. The fonts are an issue.
Your avatar seems to be gaining favour – but threads has been stomped out a-la the early JIVE days – if nothing else I find this utterly ironic given the announced purpose of the CP.
It’ll be interesting to see what develops. I suspect a new “generation” of posters will settle in there, while other will continue to settle into the homes they’ve found elsewhere.
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I had been about to post a survey (academic, yeah, yeah, flame me later) but had to wait for the forums to come back online. And then… no general discussion. Why, LL?
So, like everyone, I noticed that “your avatar” had the most posts… might as well do it there, I guess. Sigh.
If LL wants focused and constructive discussions, they’re going to realize sooner or later that they’ll need to shunt the OT stuff off to a more convenient place.
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I would be tempted to contact Amanda Linden and request a topic area for Academia and Education. If LL are willing to flat-foot everywhere else, *and* given the Reputation Engine allows them to nominate moderators, I see no reason (from their PoV) why such a topic area shouldn’t work, be informative, open to the broader community *and* properly managed / moderated (initially by LL, then by those from the Academic / educational sector who are active in SL).
The loss of a GD area is going to hurt the new community. I’ve called LL on this – but, I really should be fair here.
As I’ve posted before, certain people seemed to enter the JIVE GD area (when it eventually opened) with something of a false sense of entitlement.
They came from the very old “Resident Answers” community – and brought a lot of baggage with in terms of agendas, rivalries and outright dislikes of one another. Some started treating the GD like it was their personal fiefdom, the internecine wars between individuals (far worse than exhibited on other SL fora) continued unabated and spread, the Abuse Report system itself became a target for abuse – until the overall nastiness seemed to overshadow pretty much everything else (other than spam adverts) on people SL webpage dashboard, and must have looked to LL like an ugly canker.
As such, I have to admit I’m a little unsurprised that LL have tried to avoid an “open” GD topic area. However, I still feel that having one would be better. It would need to be policed, certainly. It would lead to gripes about “negativity” being banned, almost certainly. But providing the moderation is applied openly and fairly be LL, with it own subset of rules to guide conduct and a fair moderation process that involves human intervention, would leave them with one central place to police – and keep under their own moderation controls.
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I wish I could say that I was surprised by all this.
I have tried to access this disaster with IE8, and to no-one’s great surprise, I cannot Search. Nor, I now find, can I post….at all.
If I use Safari I can search and indeed post, but none of the previous threads are accessible. This is one huge disaster from Linden Lab, just as I was beginning to think that they had at long last realised that comunication with their customers was sensible.
I simply fail to comprehend the mental processes in some of Linden Lab staff.
Some of them just cannot handle advice, even when offered in a friendly manner, and as for criticism…..they react worse than a badly trained horse.
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One or two others have commented on IE problems. Ironically, I had repeated issues with using the JIVE platform on Chrome that never completely went away – but Lithium seems to work OK with it.
Have you raised JIRA / checked for JIRA on the matters you’re encountering?
I think that mistakes have been made with the platform, to be sure. Currently, it’s not entirely sending out the right message – and is giving them a unbalanced view of things, given that those encountering their frustrations are posting away from the new platform, leaving them with something of a sing-song all is well view of things.
My personal feeling here is, to be honest, that LL have really repeated a mistake we’re far too familiar with: launched something before they actually fully understand how to implement it and manage it. We saw it with the JIVA platform. We saw it with Viewer 2. (to name two instances in recent history where dates on a calendar have appearing to be the priority in getting things implemented.
In fairness, as well, one has to question what was going on in the Closed Beta. We cannot forgot that users were involved in testing the software for a good period prior to it being launched.
Did they not encounter issues? If not, why not? Was the Beta to limited in scope? Was the cross-section of users not wide enough? Where multiple-browser tests not performed? Were people simply not engaged enough? Or simply not given enough time?
We all hate change, so people are going to approach the new platform with certain ambiguity and bias. But, functional issues and basic decisions (no GD area) are things that are going to hit the platform hard from the outset.
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