Linden Research’s Robin Harper posted on their official weblog that it’s time to re-work their internal forum. Link on the *weblog* here.
Since their forum currently is for ‘verified’ members only (you have to, at minimum, have credit card info on-file), I will be reposting my major comments here – and summary of responses, if any, as time goes on – for the sake of the Myst/Uru community. My apologies for the length (and I’m not done yet!) but its a bit of a passionate subject of mine.
First of all, a hearty ‘Shorah!’ to Robin, Kat, Travis, Desmond, Strife, and the others who know me from as far back as mid/late 2004 and have still stuck it out here.
I am shocked to discover that it’s been horribly long since I was last here; My old sig mentioned that Myst Online was in Beta stage (~ 16 months later and now its shutdown will be in about a week ). Perhaps its more telling that my interest here fell out shortly after my term as RezMod – something that even today I’ve never talked much about, here or on my site (other than getting more cynical than I was before ). The only reason I’m here now is a passing reference to the forums under the LL weblog RSS feed (which is displayed on a sidebar at my site).
However, feedback is being solicited for something that was once very dear to my heart in SL (especially as someone who works late at night). So here goes, warts and all:
-> An update of the software is very long overdue, and allowing more general features (including BBcode or similar) would be a good idea. If you’re going to stay with paid software though, it might be worth it to give Invision a look – they have interesting features that could be useful here (which I’ll touch on shortly). It is used for many in the Myst/Uru community sites, in particular since they integrate so well with outside sources. Then again, a quick look at the Notebook Forums (running vB 3.6.5) looks more like a portal than a forum, so perhaps you can stick with that after all.
It is EXTREMELY important to have someone keep general maintenance of the forum software itself – primarily to keep up-to-date on possible exploits and test as needed before making the appropriate changes. This is *not* a full-time endeavor (I just did two major WordPress site upgrades – one from scratch – in about 5 hours over two nights). However, I have many a horror story of varying public forums being brought down or otherwise corrupted by someone with a malicious agenda. In this case its a matter of When, not If (putting on my UNIX Admin hat briefly).
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-> Enable read/write access to the forums in a more ‘tiered’ manner (I believe its called Access Groups or something similar – I don’t run a forum); This is to give the ‘best foot forward’ to the world while also allowing some flexibility for the individual. To expand further:
–> Guests (and therefore Search Spiders) should be able to read (at minimum) the Content, Conversation, and Technical Issues sections. Probably also International. These sections may need to have certain subsections hidden to Guests, depending on general usage.
–> Verified members should see the whole forum, and be able to post.
–> Premium/paying members should have the ability to ‘Mute’ or ‘Ignore’ whole sections (like General, if it gets brought back). This gives a tangible value to Premium again (many forum-based portals allow extra perks for paying them, you’d not be alone in this).
It would also allow easy view of the ‘high-end’ members like reps from IBM et al or the Concierge members (perhaps groups and hidden forums for them too?). Alternatively, allow a one-time fee of L$1000 or so for this access (thereby generating a small sink). See the forums on Priuschat.com for an example of the paid system – paying and ‘Sponsor’ members are clearly marked and show their pay level next to posts.
–> TG members should be able to use the same forum; However they’ll have their own, greatly reduced list of subfora (which are NOT seen by MG members) and special ‘approve everything’ forums from MG side (in particular the Scripting Archive) should be available to them for reading only. ‘Graduating’ to MG from the forum side is as simple as changing their group membership, and should be easily automated (and this also allows them to contribute to the benefit of their earlier peers indirectly).
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-> Don’t bother with Ratings of any sort in-forum; They got gamed in SL and they’ll get gamed here, in either direction. In fact, replace direct post counts with text or graphical representations (as most sites have done).
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Regarding General/Rants & Moderation (these two kinda go hand-in-hand):
I, like others here, believe that a General-style forum (more accurately termed ‘Off-Topic’ or ‘Off-World’ or ‘First Life’) is required to draw the venting off to where it belongs – other than the Technical Discussions anyway. However, balancing that with moderation abilities is definitely going to be a challenge (Cybin did his best work there I think, and I never wanted any part of it within the first week).
I’m not yet prepared to add further comments to this portion; Maybe later tonight. However I do think outside moderation will work, if done with forethought (an excellent example of this – despite the occasional drama – occurred on the Myst Online forum of all places).
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Yipes, I’ve been writing for well over an hour now and this is getting into a Gwyneth-sized post. As I said, this is something that was dear to me in SL even before the ResMod project, since it was great to be helping people – or generally chat – when I could not get online.
/salute
–Tim Kimball
[Yes, that’s my real name I’m signing to here. Everyone else knows me online as that name, why not y’all? Besides, I still consider myself a retired resident, despite poking my head in from time to time.]
