Linden Lab™ Needs to Fix the Events List

Location: Second Life® Events Page

Even as I get my break-dance moves down for Burning Life 2009, I wanted my students to be ready for this event or others they'll attend as part of a weekend field trip to SL™.

The rest of the story comes from a reply I made to Aracadia Codesmith at Hamlet Au's New World Notes editorial "Only Mass Adoption of Second Life Will Best Address All SL's Major Challenges." Arcadia had noted several areas where Linden Lab needs to improve customer service. including "better event listing categorization with aggressive moderation."

My reply follows.

Thank you, Arcadia. Yesterday in class we saw how broken the events system can be.

My writers are going on a class "field trip" this weekend. Most of them will go to Burning Life, but some may choose the SL events listing as an option, using the LL Web page:

http://secondlife.com/community/events/

None of my students are adult-verified that I know about, but some of the listings are XXX events. While you can sort by category, there is no way to filter results by rating. Thus "500L THINK PINK @ SEDUCTIVE NIGHTS STRIP CLUB" appears on the unsorted default list along with the tame "A Great Shopping Village - Browse New England."

RIGHT. The howls of derision among my 15 students (all 18 or 19 years old) was [sic] immediate. I joined in, because our larger topic for class was, in fact, "what limits or enables the spread of a communications tool." We had supporting evidence for SL's marginal role in front of us, provided by its maker.

Imagine not a crazy professor but a business considering using SL for meetings, when a curious middle manager clicks on the events listings....yeah, they'd adopt SL in a heartbeat.