Second Life official forums to be replaced Tuesday
Linden Lab is in the throes of closing the official Second Lifeforums 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.
The old forums will remain available for viewing by anyone, including search-engines – at least in theory – as the software has been having problems for some several days. The formerly free classifieds forum will not be recreated in the new discussion spaces, as the Lab feels that it provides numerous, non-free advertising options to choose from. That's kind of sad, as it provided some quite interesting content.
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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