Photo by Daniel Páscoa on Unsplash
Inara Pey, in her most recent blogpost report of last Friday’s Product Meetup, says this:
Sansar forums, blogs, etc: it has finally been recognised that the current tool used for these – ZenDesk – is not well suited to the task (YAY!), although fixing this is not a high priority. There have been internal discussions at the Lab about using the platform and tools employed in creating the Second Life forums, blogs, etc., to build something for Sansar – potentially more as a cost saving opportunity then for the sake of functionality. Frankly, I’m still stunned that this wasn’t the route taken from the start given the Lab have the tools and the experience to use them, which could have been easily leveraged, rather than going for a tool entirely unsuited to the task and which presents information in a very unfriendly – and dare I say amateur – manner.
AMEN. I am in 100% agreement with Inara on this. I am going to add my strong opinions on this matter, which I have shared already with everybody (including Linden Lab staff) on the official Sansar Discord forums.
I know that at the casual meetup he attended last week, Ebbe Altberg (Linden Lab CEO) said he wants to have a “consumer launch” of Sansar sometime in 2018 (as opposed to a “creator beta”). But BEFORE they do that, Linden Lab really, really needs to reconsider the software they are using for their community forums/blog/documentation. I mean this truly ugly and uninspiring thing with the too-small font: https://help.sansar.com/hc/en-us.
Frankly, it looks terrible and it projects a bad image for Sansar, which in so many other ways has a professional look and some design appeal to it. They already have a fully-functional, attractive-looking community forums/blog/announcement system in place for Second Life, why don’t they use that? Their official blog in particular really looks TERRIBLE, and it has a HORRIBLE URL to boot: https://help.sansar.com/hc/en-us/sections/115001137103-Official-Blog (hate to say it, but it’s true). Linden Lab should fix this before they kick off any campaign to attract consumers/end-users into Sansar.
Look at what High Fidelity has, it is much more visually appealing and functional: https://forums.highfidelity.com/. High Fidelity uses Medium (a free solution!) for their blog: https://blog.highfidelity.com/. Let’s compare that with the official Sansar blog:
I rest my case!
Worst case of Sansar documentation layout is the scripting reference pages. Looks like they are meant to be read by machines not humans.
Damn right. Zendesk is practically unusable from a mobile device…
Ryan,
Your view of this is quite the same as many of the Beta creators. This issue is very closely related to many things that have been said (written) about the need for quality searchable documentation for both visitors and creators.
I what to add that Linden Lab needs to evaluate the hierarchy of information very differently than they currently use on Zendesk. The Knowledge Base is not the appropriate place for a “Community”. And Bug reports is not a subset of any community. We are not a part of Linden Lab and Linden Lab is not a part of the community. They are a provider of the platform. That platform has bugs. The community does not have bugs.
Hierarchy and language are critical to searchability. Two words such as Issue and Bug need not be used interchangeably. This makes for difficulty in searching for the correct place to report BUGS. Choose one word and stick with it. And a “request” from a creators is often caused by a bug, and not simply a request for assistance in learning how to use the platform. I believe they they need to hire a linguist.