Waiting for the Forums...

Some gutless idiot with too much time on his childish hands hacked into the SL forums the other day. The forums closed. The SL website was down briefly. I suspect that, because the forums are SUCH a bizarre place, with a lot of really good, helpful information lost in a blizzard of... uh... other posts, LL will just take this opportunity to slice'n'dice. I wouldn't blame them.

On the one hand, people (usually but not always new people) post in a panic when something happens and they need help: "HELP!! I can't select my friend's objects even though I have been given rights!" Me*: Sounds like you have "Select only my objects" enabled. "TY!" Post all your specs with a query about tech concerns and a whole lot of knowledgeable people jump in to help. Those posts are fascinating to read - well, to me at least.

On the other hand, there are wagonloads of off-topic posts, which include jokes, time-based things, rants, political arguments. Personally I think most off-topic posts should have a shelf-life. Is a week too long?

On the OTHER other hand (I never said I was using a human being as my model) there are a million trillion posts that are negative/attacks/inflamatory. These include "OMG SELL SELL SELL" posts, "XYZ is a big liar" posts, "LL banned me for no reason even though I explained I shot those people 86 times by mistake" posts, "This update SUX" posts, "Go back to version 1.5" posts, "ABC is telling everyone I'm a big liar, signed XYZ" posts, etc. ad infinitum. There are some posts motivated by a spirit of genuine protest, and posts about bad things that a particular resident was subjected to by mistake (Who was it who was accidentally charged 69 times?). These have a place, unlike the posts that exist because someone wants to influence the currency price, or just be mean (although XYZ might be a big liar, there's no way for me to know if he is or is just a victim of a smear campaign). Falling in a grey area (to me) are those posts that say, "I bought product X from avatar Y and it doesn't work! Don't buy from him!" Some of those are likely to be true, while others are cases of the buyer not understanding the product, the creator being on vacation when the buyer IMs, or sometimes a buyer IMing a creator when that person is offline. There's a finite number of IMs sent to email, so I would bet that at least once the creator's first inkling of a problem has been a smear post on the forum saying s/he is not delivering as promised.

Are the forums up yet? /me surfs over to check...

*Every once in a while I am useful.