Linden Lab delays blog and forums revisions
by Tateru Nino 
Oct 24th 2008 at 1:00PM
Filed under: News items, Opinion, Second Life
The Grand and Unified Blog and Forum that was to serve Second Life users and was touted to be introduced in October has apparently suffered from some delays. October, it seems, is going to slip by, and though apparently it is "on track" we're no longer sure what that means in this context, as October only has a week remaining, and the notice gives the impression that October isn't the target.
We're not sure what the delay might be. We don't think that it would be the single-sign-on authentication being added to the blog, which constitutes an afternoon's work and about a week's testing for a focused Web engineer with access to adequate resources and well-supported internally. Then again, given that conjunction and juxtaposition of preconditions, perhaps it just might be a sticking point, at that.
The main blog apparently will remain "Linden Lab's public face, for policy and other important announcements, and updates from our executive team members." Many users we've spoken to believe that translates to "messages that have had the useful and interesting content boiled out of them by the legal and PR departments."
That's a position that's hard to argue against.
Instead, we're promised a set of sub-blogs, apparently bringing us full-circle back to 2005, where key staff members had their own trackable blogs to follow, where they would say interesting and useful things, and some semblance of feedback was possible.
Despite the additional information, however, there still isn't a clear picture of what the users will be getting at the end of the day, or how it is all supposed to work together to improve communications and feedback. We're also evincing a great deal of curiosity as to how this fits into an overall communications strategy that hasn't been communicated to the very users that we are told are supposed to be benefiting from the strategy itself.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Kara Spengler said on 9:19AM 10-26-2008
One thing is how they want a unified login to the blog .... but involve a third party running the main blog. Is there anyone out there who actually believed their 'nothing will go wrong with your data in the hands of that 3rd party' given their past experience?
[Interesting to note the thread on it was cut off at 85 posts too when people questioned the wisdom of that plan.]
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TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 3:22PM 10-26-2008
they are locking the blog response threads on the forum now? I thought that switching from the blog's comments to forum threads was to not have to lock the comments after a certain round number...
KaraSpengler said on 4:09PM 10-26-2008
Nobody really knows what they are planning now. We are directed to reply to blog posts on the forums ..... but rarely does the relevant linden respond there.
The one thing everyone seems to agree on though is that communications have gotten even worse since LL decided to improve them.
Tateru Nino said on 9:22AM 10-26-2008
It isn't *too* hard to do, though you are sort of relying on none of the host's staff being actively malicious. The Lab has all the infrastructure to do all of this on their own hardware, and actually save time and money on the deal - except that you couldn't read the blog if their network failed.
It's a bit of a head-scratcher, certainly.
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Shoshan Epsilon said on 3:40PM 10-26-2008
Tateru,
Did they say October of which year?
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Tateru Nino said on 10:18PM 10-26-2008
A fair point, but no :)
In fact, there doesn't appear to be a delivery timeline now. It is 'on track', but no hint of what month or year the track might be planned to finish.
McCabe Maxsted said on 7:50AM 10-27-2008
More WTFness from the blog post:
"Robin Linden Says:
October 27th, 2008 at 12:34 AM
@86 - Comments were turned off because we were experiencing an onslaught of very nasty spam.
@88 - It was a mistake to offer a date initially. Sometimes these projects take longer than you hope. Ultimately we’ll be better off for taking longer, because it will be more difficult for someone to post the type of incredibly offensive “comments” that showed up yesterday.
If you have more feedback or would like to talk about the blog further, please feel free to join me in my next office hour, 31 October at 12:00 PM Pacific."
Wasn't the entire point of taking comments to the forum, to avoid this kind of thing? And where is the link to the forum post where we *can* discuss this? Nowhere in the blog post.
And now that this is an amorphous date not set in stone (and was supposedly a mistake to set in stone in the first place) one of the main communication tools--the regular blog updates in the viewer--has been disabled for a feature that not only isn't DONE, but should never have even had a "done by" date in the first place! They've lobbed off another chunk of resident communication *again* with absolutely nothing to transition it to.
Honestly, I don't know how Robin keeps her job (or rather, the job that she supposedly does).
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