DD YOU Sue Baskerville: Sculpted Prim Forum - Second Life Jira WEB-135

Sunday, June 3, 2007

Sculpted Prim Forum - Second Life Jira WEB-135

There was a proposal in the Second Life Jira Issue Tracker for a sculpted prim forum with sub-forums for topics specific to different modeling software.

Sculpted Prim Forum - Second Life Jira WEB-135

The proposal is titled "Sculpted Prim Forum". It reads as follows:
A new Content Creation forum for discussion of Sculpted Prims seems logical.

There could be stickies or sub-forums for each major third party 3D modeling program used to create and edit sculpted prims for discussion of issues specific to each third party modeling program.

This would reduce the scattered placement of discussion about sculpted prims in the RA, texturing, building and other forums.


Torley Linden rejected it, marked it resolved, "Resolution: Won't Fix"

Torley's explanation for rejecting this idea is

I'm open to suggestions here, but if we're going to have one for sculpties, then from historical experience, we'd inevitably get follow-ups asking for sub-forums for flexi-prims, voice, etc. So, I suggest simplifying and starting new threads in Content Creation, generally Building, as appropriate.

Additional cultural aspect here: sculpties have been discussed extensively on the wiki, so that's another avenue:


Torley then mentions the high number of views the sculpted prim talk page in the Second Life Wiki has.


The reasoning in Torley's rejection eludes me. The evidence in the Jira shows no such proposals for the other issues Torley mentions. Torley is rejecting the sculpted prim forum based on imaginary requests, requests that exist only in Torley's mind. Further, rejecting a request for a forum because one imagines that people might in the future request other forums makes no sense. If that was the case one would have to reject the creation of the very first forum ever created, since it's existence might have spurred the creation of other forums in the future. The reason that people would request a forum in the future for different topics is the creation of a forum for sculpted prims worked well - if the creation of a forum for sculpted prims didn't work out, it is unlikely that would motivate people to request additional forums for other topics.

If people propose the creation of a forum for flexi-prims in the future, then that request should be considered on it's merit, not on the basis of potential but non-existent requests that might or might not be made in the future. Flexi-prims are variations of the same sort of prim that has existed since SL was started, and don't require the use of external software in their creation and editing, while sculpted prims are a new breed, not actually prims at all in the sense of prims being extrusions of lines, circular arcs, etc., and do require the use of external editing software with attributes quite different from the in-world object editor.

A good comparison is the Animation forum. The Animation forum was created in response to a change in SL that created a new type of entity, the custom animation, which required the use of external software, and I believe that has worked out rather nicely. It might be a good idea to use this model from actual SL history as the basis for one's thoughts on the appropriateness of creating a forum for sculpted prim discussion.

In addition, WEB-135 was made at a time when the jira system's login procedure was faulty, and the forum's BB code has been turned off, making it more difficult for people that support the idea to simply click on a link and log in and vote for it.

It's not surprising that the sculpted prim talk page in the Second Life Wiki was seen by lots of people, people can read the wiki without logging in, and the wiki is indexed by Google. If high readership is considered good, this suggests not that there shouldn't be a forum for sculpted prims, but rather that forums.secondlife.com be made viewable without logging in, and thus also indexable by Google. I've supported this idea for a long time. This would make a tremendous amount of useful information on how to use Second Life easily viewable by a large audience. A better measure of how effective a communication system a talk page in the Second Life wiki is would be the number of people posting questions there. That number, for the Sculpted Prims talk page, is not so impressive.

I suggest that those who want a sculpted prim forum make comments in the jira at the existing proposal mentioned above requesting that WEB-135 be changed back to unresolved status, and also that someone other than me create a new proposal of the same nature. Preferably someone real popular with a sunny disposition and lots of friends who can get the vote total up to at least a few hundred in a short time.

The Second Life Jira Issue Tracker is at jira.secondlife.com .

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