14 DAY TRIAL // Linden Labs, the company from San Francisco behind the social MMO game Second Life, announced in a blog on their website yesterday that they are going to shut down their forums and focus exclusively on in-world communication and a new "Linden unified blog"system.
Short term changes include shutting down the "Bulletin Board", "General Topics", "The Sandbox", "Land and Economy" and "In-world Political Science" forums over the course of the next month, followed by "Announcements", "Press and Events" (being both replaced by the "Linden blog"), "Known Issues & Development Updates" and "References and Policies" in subsequent months.
There are also some long term changes planned, described by Robin Linden as follows:
￭ The knowledge base and blog will take on some of the responsibilities of many of the feedback and content creation forums. ￭ The Classifieds will be closed in favor of Resident advertising and portal sites such as those listed on http://secondlife.com/landing/fashion/, the In-World Classifieds (which can also be found on the secondlife.com website). ￭ Inactive group sites have been culled as time goes by; we expect groups will have better asynchronous communication options within Second Life with the release of v1.12, so the groups forums will be closed within the next three months.
"Dialogue. We love it and our hope is that these changes will help to channel it. Ultimately, we are looking to keep the voices, shout-outs, feedback and diversity of opinion flowing. In order to do that, we need to make sure not to be flooded by it. With these changes we hope to retain the dialogue, and to ensure the voices are heard," Robin Linded concluded.