Torley Linden, a longtime Linden Lab staff member, tells some very funny stories of how he used to regularly get kicked off Active Worlds (the grand-daddy of virtual worlds) for talking about Second Life to the residents there.
Well, guess what? I posted a link to my survey in the Active Worlds Discord channel yesterday, and was promptly banned by the moderator for (gasp!) daring to post a survey that actually mentions other virtual worlds! Heaven forbid!
On top of that, the moderator demanded my Active Worlds username, no doubt to remove me from the platform completely. (Hey, it’s OK, I was finished with it anyway…)
So, although the reader poll runs until the end of this month, I can already announce one award (drumroll, please!): Active Worlds, hands down, for the touchiest, most over-sensitive user community!
Seriously? Get a grip. If you’re so uptight about your virtual world that you can’t even mention competing metaverse products without getting booted, or survey your users about where else they may have accounts, what kind of public relations message does that send? Maintaining a rigid, iron grip on communication is only going to backfire and make you look like a control freak. And an insecure one at that.
(God, I love Giphy… the perfect animated GIF for every occasion!)
Well Ryan, as it goes I was once banned from Second Life forums once for posting alternative world addresses in response to the Open Spaces fiasco. It was my way of protesting and I fully expected to be banned from Second Life altogether. They didn’t go that far thankfully but the whole Open Spaces affair proved a huge boost to Opensim at the time.
I myself was once banned from the official Second Life forums (and from logging into Second Life) for a 24-hour period by one of the moderators for posting a link to my blog in a forum post. O.K., that’s fine, I understand that. They don’t want people filling up that forum with spam links to external blogposts. But at least on the Second Life forums, you aren’t outright BANNED just for *mentioning* other virtual world platforms. That’s just ridiculous.