Same as it ever was

I thought that maybe today I'd be more interested in Courtney Linden's blog post about the support team, Courtney is asking people what they'd like to know more about and I'd like some stats, which Courtney positively enthused over, making me think she may have attended the Tyche Shepherd school of statistics. However I am still angry about the forum debacle. At this point I don't know whether I should be more angry with Linden Lab or myself for falling into the same old trap again, I really should know better.

There are parts of this mess I missed yesterday, the blog post has this gem in it:

"One last change: The Classifieds forums will be going away. When we began the classifieds section of the forums, it was one of the only venues in which Residents could advertise. We now offer multiple ways for Residents to advertise their goods: via product listings and banner ads on xStreet, in the Commerce forums (for services, employment and help wanted) and through inworld classifieds (which are also shown on the Second Life website)."

They're closing the classified forums because? I mean there's no proper explanation there, not everyone uses Xstreet, nor should everyone be expected to use XStreet. The new products forum is a damn useful resource for content creators and heaven knows they need resources with the RL economic climate still struggling to break free of the grip of recession but further to this Land and Property Rentals will be no more, unless you use Xstreet for land rentals and their box and where on earth are the second hand island sales going to be? There is no classified section for that.

Then we have the idea that merging the discussion based Resident Answers with the non discussion based SL Answers is a good move, look this is a simple one, if you put something weaker into a stronger substance you dilute it, as discussion is positively discouraged in SL Answers then Resident Answers will be diluted, indeed it will simply be engulfed by the non discussion based SL Answers.

Then we have the issue of the old forums being archived and made searchable by google, which has infuriated some because they posted under the impression that the forum wasn't indexed by google. I'm personally not that fussed but I can see why others are, it's an inconsiderate move.

However I guess that with this nerfing of the forums I really am most annoyed with myself, I went to a couple of office hours where feedback from those who use the forums was invited. I sent emails, I suggested they might get away with this if they moved the old forum structure to the new platform as the basic layout would be the same even if some of the usability was lacking and yet, once more, feedback has been ignored.

Really, I should know better, we've been here before, Homesteads, Adult Content, The Xstreet Forum migration, The Freebie Roadmap on Xstreet, all called for feedback, all generated feedback, all feedback was ignored and it's happening again. Invite feedback, pretend to listen to feedback, ignore feedback, invite more feedback, wash, rinse, repeat, it's the same old same old over and over and over again.

Remarkably even now whilst they are nerfing the forums they are suggesting they will solicit feedback, to quote Lexie Linden:

"Resident Answers from the forums is much like Second Life Answers.  Consolidating those two "communities of help" can create an even better Resident helping Resident resource.  As needed we can even expand the current Answers categories to accommodate more topics within, for example: Creating broke down into Building, Texturing etc.  When it gets closer to time to try that, there will be a discussion thread to get Resident input."

Ignoring the nonsense about consolidating Resident Answers and SL Answers, the futility of which I've already covered why suggest there will be discussion to get resident input? I guess there will be a thread but as with the Xstreet migration and this migration, resident input is neither valued or listened to, why continue the charade? How long can this "We come in peace, shoot to kill" dance go on?

There's no real need to discuss the categories, they already exist on the old forum, easiest thing to do would have to have imported the existing structure, but that's too easy it seems, they were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!