Second Life official forums to be replaced Tuesday
by Tateru Nino 
Feb 7th 2010 at 10:00PM
Filed under: Culture, Forums, News items, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Linden Lab is in the throes of closing the official Second Life forums and is creating alternative discussion spaces in its Clearspace blog/forum hybrid.
According to previous figures from Linden Lab staff, fewer than 700 of 18.1 million registered Second Life accounts ever participated in the official forums provided by the Lab. The partial closure of many of the most heavily trafficked areas of those forums when Lab announcements were migrated back out to the blog in 2006 did little to boost participation in the official forums.
The official vbulletin-based forums "did not scale" according to Linden Lab and were difficult to maintain, even for such modest usage levels as they experienced.
Some other forum spaces are being axed in the migration, but it is not yet clear which. "The forums have become jammed with cruft over the years, and we'll be paring down to a smaller number of top-level forums to make it easier to find the conversations you're looking for."
All these changes are to be finalized by Tuesday, February 9th. We can't help but wonder just how many people will be affected, as many Second Life users still remain unaware that the about-to-be-closed forums even exist.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Snickers Snook said on 10:42PM 2-07-2010
Linden Lab has kept the forums from being populated through deliberate obscurity. They stopped promoting them. They stopped participating in them. They stopped moderating them. Yet it was odd that Lexie Linden, over the last month, has kept referring "lengthy" discussions out of the Blogrums to those very Forums that are now being closed.
As to the non-scalability of vBulletin, numerous very smart web people have said this is utter nonsense -- the latest versions of vBulletin are very scalable, extendable and support OpenID.
Personally, I think it's more about "channeling" communications into more tightly controlled boxes. I don't think LL is really interested in free and open discussions. The blogs work well as a one-to-many communication device but they (like any blog) are really poor for ongoing discussions.
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Snickers Snook said on 10:49PM 2-07-2010
Here's an interesting stat from the soon-to-be-closed Forums:
Threads: 280,458, Posts: 2,291,318, Members: 2,772,998
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Phoenix Psaltery said on 11:51PM 2-07-2010
Typical Linden Lab doublespeak and obfuscation.
P2
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Nadine Neddings said on 2:43AM 2-08-2010
I agree completely with the previous comments made to this post. vBulletin is extremely scalable, and is in use as the de facto standard for high-traffic forums well beyond what SecondLife.com hosts. So the argument that vBulletin is to blame is just hogwash.
The saddest part of this all, is that there are many highly-useful posts in the old archives which will now be lost once and for all. A lot of history from oldbies discussing (and often resolving) first-generation grid issues.
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Katharine Berry said on 5:50AM 2-08-2010
I call nonsense on that 700 figure – while I was collecting data for the separate TG forum alone (which I stopped doing two years ago), I counted 1,973 individual posters, peaking with over 250 posting in a given week (see this graph I produced in early 2008 (do links work?): http://katharineberry.co.uk/images/forums/users.png).
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Tateru Nino said on 6:32AM 2-08-2010
It's quite a dated figure, circa 2007 - but it's the most recent official figure we have.
reenatiwari90 said on 6:20AM 2-08-2010
I agree completely with the previous comments made to this post. vBulletin is extremely scalable, and is in use as the de facto standard for high-traffic forums well beyond what SecondLife.com hosts. So the argument that vBulletin is to blame is just hogwash.
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Issac Death said on 6:35AM 2-08-2010
The vast majority of SL residents who log in and play the game every day are not very bright and large blocks of text scare the bejesus out of them. If they even know a forum is out there they will not miss it when it is disappeared by the Lindens in charge of official SL propaganda, to rid the internet of their own record of failure. Most active SL resident want only one thing: pixel sex or the ability to have it without much effort or investment. Remember that if you ever create a virtual world, that's how you make money, sex not forums.
I also hate the iPhone.
PS: Hey Tateru, did you hear that Human Health Care is using Linden technology to "service" families in the US Military? You need to get on this and tell us what to think...
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/humana-military-healthcare-services-launches-online-community-for-military-members-and-their-families-2010-02-04?reflink=MW_news_stmp
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Katharine Berry said on 6:49AM 2-08-2010
Even if it came from the 1st of January, 2007 it's still way too low, even for the TG; by then I had counted 1,394 posters, 1,045 of whom had made more than one post, and 716 of whom had made at least five. I wonder what that figure is actually counting as "participating."
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Katharine Berry said on 6:50AM 2-08-2010
And that was supposed to be a reply to Tateru's reply to my above comment, but I lack skill in the use of threaded comment systems, it seems.
Lethality said on 7:21AM 2-08-2010
Another story that has nothing to do with the "game".
I think this is indicative of just how lagging in popularity SL is. I would doubt if there were even 50,000 active users these days.
I think what they must have meant is that Vbulletin doesn't scale _down_, since it's one of the best high traffic scalable systems out there.
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Tateru Nino said on 7:57AM 2-08-2010
I believe the Lab may have been referring to its support not scaling, rather than vbulletin itself.
As for active users, the current figure is between about 800,000 and 1.4 million, depending on the exact selection criteria.
Issac Death said on 8:30AM 2-08-2010
What "game"? It ain't a game, it's a virtual world. Not an iPhone, neither.
Sick of lethality said on 6:23PM 2-08-2010
Another SL story and a troll comment from Lethality that has nothing to do with "anything"
Lethality, DUDE, we've gotten it for over a YEAR! You don't "get" SL. You don't "like" SL. Yet every time there's a post useful to the average SL user (like this one) you come in all Sarah Palinesque Holier Than Thou and bestow your (useless) opinion amounting to nothing more than slagging off SL. Do you have "Troll Tateru" written on your left hand??????
Scurry back to whatever game board you do play on and spare us the five hundredth "Hey guess what guys, I don't like SL so Massively should stop reporting on it" post.
Don't make me go back and pull out the "Lethality the Troll" post from last year that is still, sadly, appropriate.
Lethality said on 7:08PM 2-08-2010
I'm not trolling. If I was trolling, I'd follow up with more posts to egg you on. But I try to shed a little insight with my comments and sometimes the fanboys are caught off guard by it.
What I post is the truth.
I'm still not sure why Massively continues to cover this.
Tateru Nino said on 7:17PM 2-08-2010
Massively's explained its position on a number of occasions. I'm not sure what more we can do.
Ciaran Laval said on 1:54PM 2-08-2010
People read the forums who don't participate, a few have actually made comments this last week to say that.
Not migrating the classified forums across is rather churlish to say the least, there's no section for full transfer island sales inworld, which are a rather active part of the current classified forum and new designers benefit from those free listings, again making it harder for new entrants to get a foothold. Extremely short sighted behaviour.
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Ann Otoole said on 5:02PM 2-08-2010
So how come none of the clarifications and truths stated in the comments are present in the article? This is how Massively works?
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Issac Death said on 10:37PM 2-08-2010
@Ann Otoole
The Herald (or, whatever it's called these days) would never, ever fail to mention facts. And, I think that may be the reason why Otoole would associate with that fine institution. But, if I ever see her clothes showcased on SCD I will know for sure that something ain't right.
Hitomi Tiponi said on 10:11PM 2-08-2010
So, so sad they are going - found the forums so useful - and that 700 figure is so false. The blogs seem so user-unfriendly in comparison, the Lab seems determined to use blogs for things they are not best for!
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