Linden Answers forum closed

Torley Linden announces on the Linden Blog that the Linden Answers forum is to be closed. I’m beginning to think that I’d like to take PublicRelations Linden to a dark sim and orbit herm to outer darkness. Not Torley! Whoever is running the PR for LL.

It’s odd, but the Linden forums have always been very exposed and uncomfortable, right from the moment that I joined SL. Fortunately for me, I wasn’t pointed in the direction of the forums until I had been in-world for a few days, and had met people in SL who were generous with their inventory and time, and very friendly. In the forums, people snapped and flamed, but were very knowledgeable.

I was told on numerous occasions that people were “too frightened” to post on the forums. If you are an adult and you are “too frightened” to post anywhere where people might disagree with you, then you can be sure you have had a too-sheltered upbringing and ought to get out more. What’s the worst that can happen?

The Linden PR machine closed off the general and sandbox forums and are gradually shutting the whole thing down, except for the places where residents help each other with technical answers about specific subjects. They are offering the Knowledge Base, which has enormous holes, the public bug tracker, which has lots of bugs missing, and foraging in the Linden Village, as alternatives to the Linden Answers forum.

What this fails to understand, is that residents learned as much from the questions, as they did from the answers. When three people ask about the vanishing water on their estates, we don’t just learn that clicking in the the Region/Estate tool cures the problem of invisible water, but that other people share this problem too.

I never did understand why they didn’t merge Resident Answers with Linden Answers because it would have given other people the chance to respond to the Linden Answers they got. The most frustrating aspect was to receive an answer which didn’t answer the question, but to have no option but to ask another question in order to continue the dialogue.

In a world which is speeding towards three million registered accounts, it seems ludicrous to offer in-world consultations as an alternative to asking a public question. And a terrific waste too, since the answers and information which are obtained personally from a Linden won’t be available in the way that the answers on the Linden Answers forum were. It’s the dialogue which is missing — it wasn’t perfect, but asking serial questions on the Linden Answers forum at least got their attention.

I applaud the fact that they are employing a technical writer to produce documentation for the platform (although why does he/she have to be resident in California? I could do it from London!) because it has been out of date and badly organised since the moment I joined and wondered how much tax I would incur on the items I had in world. This was because the old information about taxing prims was still on the web site, although it had been replaced by tier charges.

When customers are paying as much as people are paying for their islands and land, and getting hold of customer services is so damned difficult, closing off the one avenue for communication is a huge mistake. Get the documentation and customer services right FIRST, then you can afford to close off the public communication channels.

People want to be able to engage in a dialogue when things go wrong, and by that I don’t mean that they want to wander around the Linden Village in search of that rare beast, a Linden who has the time and expertise to answer their questions with something other than an “email support” type of answer. They are terribly frustrated by the bugs and the problems with land, and if they have paid over thousands of dollars in land fees and tier fees, feel that they deserve something more than hanging on the end of a phone failing to get hold of customer services.

I fear this won’t end well.