Taking land answers where they are needed: Inworld.

Dear Raymond

I have a land question I hope you can help me with. I own a fairly large patch of land, I started small but have been able to acquire additional parcels, quite easily actually. In fact there was one piece of land I coveted, and my neighbors just gave it to me. Well now there is a really pretty bit of land right next door to me, and it really does belong with all the rest of my property to be truthful. The neighbors are not too keen on giving it to me. Would it be a bad idea if I were to just March right in and take it? I eagerly await your response.

Danke'
A. H.

Dear Adolf,

Take your pony and shove it up your bum.

Sincerely,
Ray

Alternate reply: "Nuts."

There will not be one location. It will lead to talk of ulterior motives since it would be a big traffic booster. Instead, Sarah will design a simple notecard giving kiosk or gazebo that anyone can place on any plot. Once we have it, anyone can promote where they rezzed theirs And I will put some of the landmarks in the group info. I will vary the landmarks, so more than one kiosk gets the traffic. We will also gather the notecards as just cards when we have them so you can distribute them any way you see fit. The goal is getting the information out, any way we can.

All I ask of those who place a kiosk is that they not put their own ads inside or right next to the notegiving area. This is about helping folks, not getting customers. At least that's my intention.

Fantastic! Lay one on me when its done & I'll put it out at the Shelter. The beauty of a central notecard server is that its simple to update with new information.

If you could though - try to make it low-prim. While its not a big deal for us, I can see where some folks might not be able to put it out if its more than a couple prims.

Yes, it will be low prim. Good thinking. Question: Can you create an object that gives multiple notecards? Ideally, this kiosk would be something anyone could copy and rez...

Yes, multiple notecards isn't a problem - either in the sense of giving all of them at the same time, or popping up a menu to allow the user to pick.

Yes, but can they be placed in a single object that can be copied?

Yes I'll quickly rig something up as a proof of concept, if you like.

hehe. Don't need proof. Just excited that we can create such a thing for people to rez on their land.

If you are in a creative mood, whip up a notecard on your area of expertise.

So by leaving the group I should stop paying the teir - sorry to be blonde.

Heh, auctions? Not sure there's much demand from newbies for that

That's a great idea. Can I get copies for NCI? I'm working independently on updating NCI's Land in SL notecards (way out of date now). I will be happy to give you copies when I'm done.

Also--we offer two classes each week on Land in SL: Land 1: Basic Land Ownership & Land 2: Advanced Land Ownership. I wrote them (though I don't teach them), and they cover pretty much everything a new player needs to know about land here. We also have a SL Consumer Skills class that covers very basic stuff and has a section on scams (including land scams) that are prevalent in SL.

I love answering this question…

NCI/New Citizens Incorporated is SL's largest resident-run and resident-financed new player help organization. We offer over sixty classes & events each week, tutorials & help notecards, a very large collection of freebies, personal assistance from NCI Helpers and Land Officers (both in person and via the open enrolment "New Citizens Inc." group), free retail space for new players at our New Residents Mall, Ginny Gremlin Park, and two sandboxes.

We have well over a hundred active volunteer Helpers and Land Officers and four main campuses: NCI Kuula (in the Kuula sim on the Sansara continent), NCI South (in the Hamnida sim, adjacent to the South Welcome Area), NCI Beach (on the island of Fisherman's Cove), and NCI Caledon (on the Nova Civis Caledon OpenSpace sim in Caledon).

If you plan to place Kiosks, may I suggest you purchase a copy of Susan Steinbeck's Kiosk.net. It allows all the kiosks to be updated via a central server. Saves an incredible amount of time when it comes time to make the inevitable updates to the information. I use the system for my maps, and it works very well.

Carl, I obviously found the person I need to talk to to get the notecards portion of this project done (or you found me). How can I get a transcript of your land class?

Hey, land experts willing to share your knowledge: Please send notecards on your area of expertise and join the group!

Just found this on slexchange. It's an awesome idea, and if Rays cool with it, I'm gonna get it. I think it would be the perfect scripts to ad to this project.

I'm cool, baby. Thank you so much for al you're doing on this. You were already the queen of helpfulness in all things land related. What can I promote you to now?

~confused~
i have the notecard giver that you posted in the group notice rezzed at my rental office. is this going to be superseded by a kiosk? if so, can it be made moddable?
omg!

Notecard giver is to announce the group. It will be followed by an info kiosk. Right now people who need help will get it from our group members if they IM them online.

Yes I didn't know what NCI is. I spend all my time rezzing manta rays and serving my tenants on Liome. But at least I know what a landbot is.

I sent you a notecard inworld with the text above, and with notes explaining that it needs to be updated at both the beginning and end of the text.

I also sent you a copy of all the old Live Help notecards that I have.

A version of the text of all these old Live Help notecards is available in the Second Life Wiki at wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:Text_from_In-world_Notecards .

As noted in the wiki, the information is old and needs to be updated. I'm pretty sure this isn't just hypothetical about the need for this information to be updated.

==========================================================

There's lot of help information available - the problem is how to get people to know where to get it when they need it. For example....

At 3 in the morning Friday night Saturday morning after a few too many drinks, when people decide they have a sudden need to buy land in Second Life after having done zero preparation for doing so - with none of their SL friends still awake and them not thinking clearly enough to hang out at popular new user place like Help Island Public to ask for advice before making a purchase...

Under those conditions, how would anyone possibly know to send IMs to a group's members for advice?

A person that wants help in Second Life and has no personal source of help like a friend, can use the built in help system in three ways: they can press F1, or they can use the Help menu, or they can look in their inventory for help information.

Pressing F1 produces an offer to load the "Second Life Support web page" in an external browser, or not to.

Clicking on the Help menu produces:


The first option shown in the above image produces the same result as pressing F1.

The second option produces a mozilla browser window with a Back, Home, Forward, and Go buttons and a field to enter an url at. and displays the following:



Note that the first option there is an outdated reference to F1 as if it produced a useful response - it used to bring up the very good F1 help system, now it just opens up the confusing Support Portal page. It would be more efficient to skip the mention of F1 and just link directly to the confusing Support page.

There's bound to be some people looking for advice on land in SL that go to the Orientation Island Public based on this - I wonder how much help they find there.

Since folks using the interface to get help on a land purchase or anything else, for that matter, get directed to go to the Help Island Public sim, those who want to help these folks that are getting help "by the book" should in some fashion get their information there in some form or another. There is a whole sim there, with no way to put up a great big sign that says: "What do want help with? A. Land B. Clothes C. Etc...." and no way to know that someone arrives in the sim, and no way to know what they need help with unless they happen to ask for what they need within your chat range. This is what happens when you have your help system done with volunteer helpers, some official, some not, in a 3D simulator, instead of using the far more efficient system of well designed web pages, and with your Chat With A Helper system having no way for the helpers to shut the thing off when want to be off duty.

There's another source of help built into Second Life: notecards in the Library.
If you go to Inventory, Library, Notecards, there's one called Help!, a set of notecards showing Jeska as the creator, but which I think started out as the work of SL user Kex Godel.

There are links to notecards in that Help! notecard, and the ones on Land Buying and Land Renting produce a popup that say they were last updated July 5 of 2006.


A person needing help with using SL on whatever topic either uses the "mechanical" system built in to the interface, or an external "mechanical" system like using a web search engine, or they ask a person for help.

If you want to improve the quality of help people get from a mechanical system you need to work on improving what happens when people press F1 or when they click the Help menu option, or when they do an inventory search for the world Help, or when look up "
Second Life land" in a search engine.

If people are starting out their search for help by asking a person, the quality of help they get is completely determined by which specific person they ask. If they ask the guy that's busy putting out the replicating Ninja Turtle particle generators they are likely to get a different response than if they ask a normal person.

I've made a page in the Second Like wiki for anyone willing to take IMs inworld with questions about land to list their avatar name. In other words a place for anyone willing to join Raymond's group to list their name in the wiki. If someone asks you for help with land, you could direct them to wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Land and they could find a list of people to IM without having to know how to use the search mechanism for groups.


It's 1:30 in the morning, I think I'll stop now. Note that this post doesn't purport to add up to anything in particular.

Makes me a bit sad that we have to do LL's work for them. I mean, we don't have to, but those poor defenseless noobs break my heart.

Hi Raymond send me an invite would be happy to help
and good on you

oh also contact ed barron of springboard magazine a magazine specifically set up with the noob in mind about producing an article

Maxed out? WTF? how can I make it so more people can join?