Welcome areas....

Maybe noobs could first spawn as fruits of a noob tree, and ripen in a few minutes. Then they'd drop to the ground, but still be very small and undefined. Over the course of a day or two they'd gain abilities - at first they'd just roll around and have no inventory. Once they had been inworld for a few hours they'd have an inventory and be bigger - they'd be able to move faster but still wouldn't be able to affect grown residents much.

Grown residents would gain by helping nooblets, as measured by the nooblets choosing to give them rating points (one per nooblet). Each rating point would count towards a rl trinket, like, say, an SL keychain for 5,000 points. Negative ratings would be added together, too, and anyone with a negative noob rating balance would be automatically muted for all noobs. After a certain amount of time inworld the noobs would be "done" and be able to do anything.

Thanks for the kind words about NCI--I do have a few corrections:

1) The Shelter is not part of NCI. They are a separate and older organization than us. We think very highly of the Shelter and promote them at all of our campuses and infonodes.

2) NCI only has one proper Orientation Island--Caledon Oxbridge--which as the name indicates is a collaboration with Caledon. However, we do have four campuses, and some of the material on those is orientation island like. Generally, however our campuses are designed as the next step off OI.

The 'first hour' stuff has prompted LL to build completely a completely new Orientation Sim. Last I heard they were wasting money on an outside company to do this (why employ moles?) despite the fact outside companies have built OI's before and all have met with disaster. I expect that, with a new OI, new strict measures will be placed on them. Most of the people in the welcome area's have been banned more times than you could count on every hand and foot of every resident of second life and these people long ago developed a means of simply re-registering and logging back in. They *do* get banned, but they *do* come back. LL is working around this problem, but it will take some time.

It wouldn't surprise me if, at some point in the future, Linden Lab banned registration with free disposable webmail accounts such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, and restricted it to ISP-based email accounts. Granted, most ISPs allow their users more than one inbox (the basic limit in the UK is, on average, five or thereabouts, but there are probably exceptions to that) and there will no doubt be some workaround to it if a griefer is determined enough. But it's a possibility.

This is what's going on at the welcome area's:
http://greifology101.blogspot.com/
It seems to be some kind of weird sport...

And there's some verbal fight going on:
http://watards.blogspot.com/
This blog has some links to other, similar, blogs.

Disgusting and pathetic if you ask me!

Think they just need to get laid, to be honest. Let's have a whip round for a professional to sort them out?

They have real jobs to do at the Lab, they can't always be playing enforcer. If you see something that violates the terms of service or community standard, it's your responsibility to report it yourself.

so being a policeman in real life isn't a real job?

Sure, it is. Though dealing with griefers is more of a firefighting situation than anything, and they're volunteer firefighters. Unless they're on the governance team, enforcement is a secondary responsibiliy.

I'm not sure what's going on with the first blog. Between the hit counter and my utter lack of recognition of anybody in the photos makes me wonder if he's actually a pain, or if he's just mental.

The Watards blog is written by the source of the grief about the trouble they're creating, essentially one person on a nice harassment campaign. Standing there regularly, the watards blog author has highly selective memory at best.

Not really much point in paying those two idiots much attention at all, because it's just not productive. You want to fix the Welcome Areas: Here's an idea, spend some time, and when you see a newbie call for help, do what I do and IM them and help them out. Whining about the problem is about effective as trying to solve long division by chewing gum.

Some people should just be pre-muted universally.

This thread should be moved to the classifieds or special events since it's an advertisement.

I sort of like this idea. Griefers would be forced to go through the nooblet stages and would probably give up after one or two stages. Sincere folks would find the "quest" that many seem to seek upon game-entry. When they gain their final "level," LL could toss L$1000 at them or something, to reward them for sticking it out.

I think the point is that Linden Labs should be paying someone to be an enforcer in the welcome areas. As a real job, because it really needs to be done.

I was just at a WA, helping a newbie, and the region either crashed or I did... either way I've tried to relog several times and just get "Login Failed." with no explanation. I tried the work av as well, same thing, so I don't think it's a ghosting problem.

Anyway there's probably a n00b wondering why he was suddenly abandoned, or else talking to a phantom me. Ya TRY to help, and SL still cuts you off at the ankles... heh.

ETA: This time I got the "high load, logins disabled" message. 71k online.

Excellent point! If getting new people into SL is a major initiative for LL, and it looks like it is...then paying staff or paid residents to manage the welcome areas and bring order should also be a top priority. Other companies who value community development and expanding the installed base of members take this approach. I would hope LL steps up to the plate to improve the new resident's experience by putting Lindens, or Mole equivalents (people accountable for their actions and paid by LL) in the welcome areas 24/7. While volunteers mentors are very important, LL has to be able to hold someone accountable for their actions in key roles and responsibilities. That's why they need to pay someone for this role. Otherwise the new BS Flash screens are just sizzle that end when the resident signs up and enters the welcome areas.

I should point out that Moles are not paid.

Just to repeat a point, there _are_ still Mentors who hang out at Welcome Areas. The problem is, Mentors have no special abilities to ban people or anything like that (even though some Mentors will falsely claim that they have; another popular fallacy is that their ARs get special recognition, which also isn't true). The way it _used_ to work is that Mentors would use the Second Life Mentor channel to call for a Linden to deal with any griefing at a WA or HI, but that's nowhere near as reliable now, since most Liaisons are now watching the ticketing system rather than the help channels. Plus, many of the PG offenses at WAs take place in voice, so there is no way to show any evidence.

You might want to quote to preserve the context of your message, especially if you're not going to click the quote button on the message you're replying to...

Hmmm, my understanding was they are. If not, then it needs to be LL staff.

Um...



The SL Wiki seems to disagree with ya, Baloo. Did they change the program?

I have visited a couple of welcome areas recently, not very nice places. Lots of spam and idiots showing off in front of newbies.

I see a number of places on the web saying the moles get ten bucks an hour. I didn't see this stated by Linden Lab.

Then an easy way to eliminate labor costs would be be to do away with the tag "welcome area" from these cesspools and stop sending newbies there. If I was new and transported to one of these places I would resign from SL in a second.

Newbies have to have SOMEWHERE that is their first experience outside the Prelude, though, and it helps to have people there so that the new folks don't think SL is empty.