Well some of you might have seen that Sony updated the official US forums and in my view they have taken a back steps and not a forward one. Not only in look and layout but also by adding the following crasy rules to the Home forums.
Censorship pure and simply. Stopping code sharing is childish thank goodness for this site. Where we know we always get great up to the minute information about home. This is typical of NA psn where you always get one epic fail after another. Not only the can never do anything right. Now they want to control what we think. What we see and now what we write. I can live without NA forum, Home and most especially the thieves of PSN store. With their scam program the so called psn rewards beta... Merry Christmas all..
no code sharing means they're trying to make money off the free codes they sent out meaning,free for u ,but i'll have that same item.... but whata ya gonna do thats BIG PIMPIN for ya
[This is a slightly modified version of a post I made on the PS Forums. It was deleted almost immediately without explanation, even though one can find numerous posts (as well as entire threads) on the forums at this very moment which are protesting the recent changes to the Edit feature, as well as the new restrictions regarding the dissemination of promotional codes, and the discussion of other Home regions. People are so angry now that they're cursing at moderators, and those posts haven't been deleted, so why was mine? If there's one thing that's now been made crystal clear to me, it's that the people running NA Home don't actually use PS Home or the PS Forums. For them it's just a business. But what I find truly shocking, is that the people responsible for managing such a highly technological product as PS Home don't seem to understand the use of modern day technology themselves. Nor do they seem to be interested in listening to or learning from our feedback.] An Open Letter to Jack Buser Regarding the Recent Changes to the PlayStation Home Forums First, know that I’m a Sony loyalist. I own a 60GB CECH-A01 launch model. I also own a PSP, a PS2 and a PS1 – in fact, just give me a PS1 and Vagrant Story and I’m good to go. I’ve been registered on these forums since Nov 2003, and in the past I’ve won Post of the Week (18 Oct 2007) and also Thread of the Week (19 Dec 2007). I’m also a big fan of PlayStation Home. I guess that makes me a bit of a masochist, since I’ve spent a lot of time defending both the PS3 and PS Home, two projects which have both received more than their fair share of criticism. So why aren’t I on PlayStation Home right now, or playing Dragon Age: Origins on my PS3? Well, I’m glad you asked me that. You see, you (or your subordinates) made some changes recently to the PlayStation Home forums which have made me and a lot of other PlayStation Home users rather upset. Let’s start with the forums themselves. They’re difficult to find, difficult to navigate, and once you start using them, about as user-friendly as a porcupine that just backed into a cactus. I don’t know what it is you imagine we do on these forums, but apparently you’re unaware that we primarily use them to exchange information about PlayStation Home or you wouldn’t have broken the Edit feature. Now I won’t speculate as to why you felt it necessary to restrict our ability to edit our own posts, but as a consequence our most important information threads have now been seriously compromised – which means that in order to get and communicate the information we need, many of us will now be spending a lot more time on other forums and a lot less time on the PlayStation Home forums. Do I have your attention yet? Before making changes of this magnitude, it might have been wise to seek the input of the most active posters on these forums – particularly when the people making these decisions apparently aren’t familiar with the use of internet forum or message board software. Next, we now have a new rule against the sharing of promotional codes for PlayStation Home items. Now I’m not going to get into the arguments for and against the sharing of promotional codes as that’s outside the scope of this discussion. Instead, my concern is merely with how you intend to enforce this ban, in a world where anyone can access Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Youtube, AIM and Gmail on any decent smart phone. So if you make it impossible for PlayStation Home users to get information about promotional codes here, what do you think they’re more likely to do, stop searching for, using and sharing such codes, or migrating to other forums where such restrictions don’t apply? And finally, we now have a new prohibition against the discussion of content from other regions, i.e., the European, Asian and Japanese Homes. Now again, I’m not going to get into the arguments for and against “region hopping.” Instead, I simply wish to make a few observations based upon my own experience with PlayStation Home. First, those of my friends who are the most active Home users tend to be active in multiple regions. Second, those of my friends who buy the most virtual items tend to buy items in multiple regions. And third, those of my friends who are the most active Home users tend to be familiar with other virtual worlds as well, worlds such as Second Life and Kaneva. My best friend on PlayStation Home is from the United Kingdom, and she owns 36 personal spaces, all fully furnished, and that’s just on her NA account. I have a lot of friends from the UK. I also have friends from the Asian and Japanese Homes who are here in NA Home almost every day, and they are all active buyers of NA items. So let me ask you this: If for some reason the prospect of generating additional revenue from Europe, Asia and Japan doesn’t appeal to you, and you decide to make it increasingly more difficult for Home users to visit other regions, what do you think they’re more likely to do? Say goodbye to their friends from other Homes, or emigrate to other virtual worlds where such restrictions don’t exist?
I'm personally miffed about the post edit time limit, i had a number of information threads that can now no longer be edited and have had very big parts of them removed. Luckly the information come from this sites pages, but i was shareing it with the wider community, thats something im not really able to do now due to the new edit time rule plus the rule of other regions content.
The new forum rules at the new Playstation Forum are facist to say the least. I really don't understand the need to censor information. It just goes to show you how insecure our North American team is about what they are doing and how sensitive they are to criticism on the home forums. They certainly read them and they are tired of getting flack for lackluster performance relative to other regions.
The EU have been the same for a long time, diff is it was more to do with the community crying about that stuff being posted, where on the US i never really seen many making a fuss out of none US news and that getting posted. One things for sure atlest here will always stay for a Home community thats one.
@Aeternitas33- I honestly don't see why the ban for talking about other regions. If anything I think it would be of great benefit for Sony, that way they know what works and what doesn't work. But to keep the average Playstation Home user(ie. me) from experiencing what's out there is nothing more than having me become ignorant of what's available. Is that a good thing? No. Why have the bar set low by making ignorance high. I mean if it weren't for the Irem thread I wouldn't be able to figure any of the Christmas events over in Japan. Not to mention making friends as I went, which is really hard to come by, least for me. I don't see how talking about other regions hurts NA, I mean I still buy stuff from NA's Home and spend a great deal of time there, but to hinder knowledge spread, I cannot agree.
Your thread was probably removed because it was cogent and rational. It is easy to dismiss threads where someone raves or curses, so there is little need to delete it. But your thread is thoughtful and well written, two things that make people think carefully about what you are saying. Can't have that in the forms- might cause real concern. It is too bad this was deleted, but I am glad you reposted it for us.
Edit. I had thought that the mods had deleted a 2nd thread of mine, but I was wrong. It was actually another posting problem. They're telling us that the posting problems have now been resolved, but obviously they haven't been. What is the point of having a forum if you can't even post on it?
2nd deleted post Here's the URL to an article about Jive. I posted this on the PS.com forums, and of course it was deleted. http://snickitty.blogspot.com/2010/04/jump-jive-and-fail.html
Jump, JIVE and fail! Phish out of water! As if things couldn't get any worse, yesterday Linden Lab was forced to shut down all Private Messages (PMs) in JIVE SBS as well as several other program features due to a successful phishing attack that used a security hole in PMs to gain access to people's passwords and account info. The other proggie features disabled include embedded images and vids as well as some formatting stuff. I wondered why I saw a PM notice in my email account but when I went to the flogs to read it, a message simply said that feature was "unavailable". So did Linden Lab notify everyone up front? Oh no no noooo!. They buried it in the Community section. Did they do a MOTD? Oh no no noooo! Trusting our real life information to the current regime at Linden Lab is becoming increasingly suspect. Now on to the original article.... Jump, JIVE and Fail! Today's topic grrlz, boyz and furrehz is JIVE SBS, the software platform that Linden Lab uses to power its dreaded blog / forums aka the "blogrums". First a disclaimer, I'm no expert on bulletin board software except as frequent user of different forums and as a beginner/intermediate LSL scripter. So take what I say with many grains of virtual salt. I'll admit I was thoroughly ticked off when teh Lab shut down a perfectly good, working forum at XStreet SL (aka SLX) and moved it to their fancy, shiny Clearspace (JIVE Software) platform. And I was likewise ticked off when they moved the Resident Answers forums over to same. Why? Because the old vBulletin forums were searchable, organized reasonably well, used screen real estate efficiently, had a functional editor and allowed signatures. Plus they were in a "standard" format that most other web-based forums use. You didn't have to learn to drive the car all over again. What we got with Clearspace was flashy looking (yeah it "looks" like Web 2.0) but offered nothing more usable and in fact gave us broken search, an editor from hell (jumping cursor, no multiple quoting, random indenting, no embedded spell check, etc.), took up huge amounts of screen real estate for minimal content, no signatures, no real thread tools, poor organization, reduced readability, etc., etc. And of course, when asked why Linden Lab moved to Clearspace in the first place, we were told that vBulletin simply wasn't "scalable" or "capable enough" to power the new, improved SecondLife.com. (The fact that some of the largest web bulletin board sites in the world use vBulletin seems to escape Teh Lab -- more on this later.) The failed upgrade. Needless to say, thinking the blogrums couldn't get any worse, most of us SL'ers were eagerly looking forward to the long promised upgrade to the second generation platform, JIVE SBS ("SBS" = Social Business Software). We were told it would address many of the usability issues, fix bugs, improve speed, yada yada. And what happened? JIVE SBS got installed and just about everything went to hell. Let's see:search is worse than ever editor is still borked -- jumping cursor, broken quotes, broken indent, HTML no longer works can't edit (change) your own post once posted serious security flaws that exposed real life email addresses and apparently, for some, their real life names. history for many was deleted password integration was used from XStreet SL but doesn't translate correctly to the blogs so you don't stay logged in many residents can no longer login period and are now forced to using alts to post logins treat "Snickers Snook" and "snickers Snook" and "snickers snook" as separate accounts recent activity is blanked response has slowed down dramatically -- sometimes taking minutes for new pages of posts to display And yesterday, we got this acknowledgment by Wallace Linden of the problems: Thanks, everyone, for your patience while we continue to iron out the upgrade to our blogs and forums software. We're actively working on the issues that have been brought up in this thread (as well as others we've uncovered) and have already begun pushing fixes to the software. Each of these, of course, requires additional testing, so you won't see all the bug fixes all at once, but you will start to see the effects of things over the next few days and early next week, and going forward from there. It has definitely helped to have people reporting these bugs to us. Again, thanks for your patience, and thanks as well for your feedback. Another JIVE SBS failure - Harmony Central So once again, WHY did the Lab roll out such a flawed piece of software and WHY are they using JIVE in the first place?? This led me to do a bit of internet searching for other sites using JIVE SBS. While my search wasn't real productive (hey, there aren't that many sites using JIVE), I turned up an interesting one called Harmony Central. It's a very popular bulletin board / web portal for musicians featuring product reviews, user-to-user discussions and user-to-expert posts. Lo and behold, Harmony Central JUST converted to JIVE SBS from vBulletin, much like Linden Lab. Apparently the rationale was similar -- scalability and integration with their other web shinies. Well guess what. Users on Harmony Central hate JIVE SBS! (Click to read some of the posts.) The level of vitriol being thrown at Harmony Central's management is nothing short of astounding to me. It makes the invective often directed at Linden Lab sound mild in comparison. They rolled JIVE back and out! In fact, the hate and rate of attrition from the site obviously became so bad that HC's management actually did something about it. (SHOCKING!!) The CEO announced a rollback to the original forums (vBulletin)!! OMG!! I think I'm gonna faint. If Mark Kingdon ever admitted a mistake like that and actually did something similar about it, I'd expect the world to stop spinning on its axis and look for the immediate second coming of Jesus. Now admittedly HC does not appear inclined toward rethinking their whole JIVE move right now but at least they're "looking" at it. So half the site was rolled back to a previous version of JIVE while the other (most important) half reverted to vBulletin. What more on the JIVE front? The next part of my search adventures led me to another interesting site -- http://rankings.big-boards.com/ where you can find most of the large web-based bulletin boards ranked according to number of posts, users and software. Well guess what? Most of the largest BBS are either running phpBB or vBulletin! The largest site running JIVE is Sun's Java forum ranked #748. I guess Sun would use JIVE since it's the only one of any size written in Sun's own Java. So my conspiracy twitchy nose says this smells like a backroom venture capital or board-level connection between Linden Lab and Jive Bunny Software. On the surface, there sure doesn't seem to be any rational explanation for a company that so clearly depends on user-to-user communication to want to shoot itself in the foot with JIVE SBS. Is there?
I particularly dislike the new forum. The region and code rules, the downgraded posting options, its truly a mess. Talking to Aeternitas the other night, we've come to the conclusion that the new forums are headed on a crash course at this rate. Activity there has dropped a significant amount. Heck, I get 'downtime for maintenance' about 2, 3 times a day just trying to log in, especially within the last few days. Deleting a few cookies took care of that but the average poster wouldn't know to do so and simply give up, which would explain the lack of posting there in general, along with regulars simply leaving. Sony needs to get Lithium back or a new SBS, Jive simply cannot handle the PS forums.
I have to agree with you Strider, thank goodness I have a place to post about all this. The no code sharing rule is indeed childish and silly, not all of us can be at our PS3's 24/7 so forums is a great place to check, even if its universal codes that anyone can use, just outrageous. I'm posting here more after something I heard happened between a friend of mine with good standards and a power hungry Mod who went 'above the rules' and banned her for no reason. I'm simply becoming fed up...
^^ Chad means me.. Kitty_Pyra I got into a argument with Mohawktown and because I publically pointed out how he says the community has to follow the rules but he purposely flames and trolls the community into anger about the forums he banned me. So free speech and truth arent important anymore at the Sony site... I've caught Mohawk in so many lies now that I've found out he's actually the head moderator for the forums in general. So he can literally get away with what he wants and nothing can stop him. Oh in his defense of how he acted he let it slip that they are doing more than actually collecting the 'constructive critisism' but they are also tracking those who support the sites new layout and those who dont. He actually in PM said how 4 complained on a post i made. 3 pro-site users and 1 anti-site user" So FYI our names are being marked too your views are noted by mohawktown
mmhmm.. long story short short.. I was caught in a debate with a person in new forum feedback... I made a post then had a PM from mohawktown..he said that because of a sentence in my post he was going to delete the entire post and because that one sentence violated the TOS for flaming, etc.. it was also going down as a mark on my profile. I sent a PM back saying that the setence was NOT a flame and meant that the person i was responding to had a narrow focus and refused to see other possibilities.. I also said im tired of HIS double standards to the rules and will take my leave of the forums if this is how they are going to be run.. So I updated my profile with what happened... Posted a goodbye on the HOME section...also tellig what happened I then typed up a msg to mohawk to tell him where he can put his attitude. And how dare he apply harsh rules to the community when since his first post he's purposely been trolling those who dont like the forum setup and are upset at all the bugs. If hes going to apply the rules so much he needs to do it to himself... I hit send on the PM and was kicked out ot the sony sign in screen.. I found out thanks to chad that magically my 'goodbye post' in the HOME section magically was deleted too... Mohawk doesnt like to be called out for breaking the rules like he has..
It really seems to be getting silly over there, i know just off the top of my head without doing background checks tha Jive is a bad forum platform. Also just seen users can openly use javascript on the forum whats never a good idea. Have you had any email saying you been banned and how long for?
LOL no email yet.. The funny part is if you pull up a history of mohawks mod history in SCEA.. they've included fine print on the TOS in forums he ran for like God of War.. that says the moderators can ban you for any reason and can make rules at their discretion based on day to day activities. "Verbally abusing the staff won’t get you anywhere and might increase the length of your ban." Taken off his list of rules under that forum updated back in Nov 2010.. I didnt curse in my post on the HOME section but I did state flat out that he has a double standard.. and breaks his own rules... So hes godmoding.. and Carla.. if they sent me an email.. that would be validating the ban! Still.. i dont want to go back their.. its obvious he's a jerk and very power hungry.. Based on his posting history in new forum feedback sadly he reminds me of a child with a new toy.. he was given more power and simply doesnt have the ability to use it right.
Well, I see you believe me now. I know perfectly well they're digging through each and every one of my posts. Let them. I love PS and I love Home. The only thing I don't like is how the forums we all call home, or at least used to, are being destroyed by this Jive SBS.
