All Volunteers Banned From Help Islands

Lexie Linden decided to ban all volunteers and mentors from the Help Islands that regular avatars have no access to anyway. Will this improve the new user experience and increase retention? Only Lindens on Linden Land can use land tools to make a island or parcel accessible to avatars under 30 days old only.This ability should be made available to all landowners. This would really assist landowners in developing greifer-free welcome areas.

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What in the world is going on, I wonder?

I used to help newbies when I naively believed that I was really doing good. They became more and more frustrating as I spent more and more time helping them.
I think Lindens could do a good job in assessing the needs of noobs.
Anywho , within hours these fully fledged citizens will be bumping into streetlights and crashing thru our living rooms as usual, building plywood boxy homes on our land and trolling for sex at nude beaches. They will have names like BangHigh Hogbottom and Blimp Cashew and will arrogantly believe they know everything about us.
Pretty soon they will send out interviews and questionnaires on teh forum.

*just tp'ed to a random Help Island just fine*

*wonders what the fuss is about*

I don't understand the rise in prices of OS, forbidding even resale to someone who doesn't own a regular parcel, simultaneous with banning volunteers from helping newbies (at least officially, on help islands). Is there a corporate takeover coming? I don't get it. Everything seems to be getting so hard nosed? Or is it just me?

After all, does LL have the manpower to help everyone who needs it? Seems like help is already hard to find, going by Yumi's thread and the number of newbies I find who - even after going through the help island tutorials - don't understand even basics like how to TP or how to change clothing.

That is Random Help Island, Kitty. Random Noobs go there. Kinda like Island of Random Avatars.
Sorry Kitty - you are now randomized

so finally noticed that the retarded mentors are just in it for personal gain and are as stupid as a donkey when it actually comes to inworld issue`s

yea, had a good amount of run-ins with those smartass mentors, about fracking time

Gee, thanks.

If that's what I get for years of being a mentor, I guess I'll just hop in the private jet LL provides all mentors and fly to the bank in the Cayman Islands where I keep all the millions of dollars of personal gain I've made telling people how to get boxes off their heads.

Anyway, the Help Islands I tried let me in.

Now back to swimming in the pool filled with gold Linden dollar coins that Philip minted for me personally.

there are more idiots in that group then usefull people, no wonder LL started to whipe it clean (just not clean enough by a long shot)

LOL...hey...make sure you give them MY name when they are passing out the mentor dinero. I have spend a LOT of my own time and $L to help get the random noob started. Just for the fun and interest in doing it. I had NO idea there was pay too! lololol

-Blu-(searching for her piece of the pie)

The Help Islands that even noobs cant get back to when they teleport away. Those Help Islands.

Its odd the Lindens don't want their own volunteers to interface with the new players - so why would they allow them to be subjected to the attention-hungry mobs at Waterhead and Ahern? Since new players are randomly dropped in that area after the Help Island experience - I think that their first interaction on the mainland should be with an official Mentor or Greeter - not a guy wearing a huge penis, emtting texture spam and handing out group tags to free sex and money.

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me and friends have been wondering that for ever

i still remember my first second off help island arriving in fracking ahern, glad tho as i met Right Paean there and we`re still good friends, but WTF indeed after all this time

Since the problem is with newbs piling up in spots and not knowing where to go, maybe the newb education should be in the form of a grid-wide tour to get them moving. A HUD giving some simple menu options, like "Would you like to work on your appearance?" with buttons for places with free skins and clothes, or "Would you like to see some scenic areas?" with buttons giving landmarks to nice places, might help.

Or "would you like to buy some land" giving two choices 1. Nautilus 2. Open Sim (but you can only look at it).

Mis-information at its best, take a snippet of a conversation and turn it into something it is not.

IMHO you need to read this in the context it was stated, not this one meeting, but all the meetings where the issue of SL Mentor Greeters has been openly discussed by the VTeam.

(Doc: All corrections will be in parens)
All Volunteers Banned From Help Islands (Doc:Totally not true)

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Lexie Linden decided to ban all volunteers and mentors from the Help Islands that regular avatars have no access to anyway.
(Doc: Lexie is one of the Vteam and the initiative to focus on the NUE -new user experience- is not new and has been in the works for some time now. A new group will be created to focus on the NUE and the old mentor program as it is will not be tasked to that mission.The volunteer program is simply changing with the times.)

Will this improve the new user experience and increase retention?
(Doc: The Vteam and the mentor group did tests for retention using some new techniques and we found it very successful!)

Doc: What I have to say ***I think a less negative amount of patently not true information would probably have been a better idea. The official volunteer program is not some secret society we have meetings all the time and every Mentor can use the resources available TO ALL RESIDENTS to check what is going on.
Passing out incorrect information helps no one and just shows that your not using resources to find out what is really going on. Not helpful, not thoughtful and just a general waste of time.

Is that a personal opinion or do you have real life proof. Your choice of words, in my opinion, prove your level of comprehension.

Feel free to come and say hello to a working mentor, we will make time for even you.

Here here! Even a tired out mentor like me renewed her mentor membership. I may not have the health to go actively seek out people in need on Help Island but I will never turn down tutoring someone seeking help in learning how to use SL or advise in how to deal with griefers or just plain help in any way I can. We may not know everything but who in SL does? We're human as anyone else and we mentor to help people. We don't get brownie points with anyone for it. We just do our best to help.

Currently... At this exact moment, I'm standing in Help Island 219... Reading this portion of the minutes of the most recent Monthly Mentor Meeting:.... And thinking to myself.... This is how rumors get started. (=_=)

I've gate-crashed a few Mentor parties and attended some V-Team office hours, back when they were open to mere mortals, but I've never been a Mentor. So maybe this all isn't as mysterious as it seems to an outsider. But I gotta say, to an outsider, there seems a bewildering superabundance of communication modes for volunteers.

There's a wiki "Volunteer Portal" at https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Volunteer_Portal.

There's a Mentor's forum at /204/1.html and one for Greeters at /207/1.html.

There's a WordPress blog at http://vteamblog.com/.

There must be at least one in-world Group for chat and notices, and I think an email list.

There are office hours and meetings, and a whole complex of sims around SLVEC for in-world communications.

This has all the earmarks of an organization that was at some point advised that it had "communication problems" and went off in all directions simultaneously, in search of a solution. So now, if one were trying to inform and organize all Volunteers, it would seem pretty darn difficult to guess which ones might get which medium, or even to remember what was already said where. If there's some signal lost in transmission, it would hardly seem surprising.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Main_Page

Resources that are available to all residents at any time.

Helping is not entirely devoted to The Official Volunteer Group
Resident Help Groups have been around for years.
NCI
Shelter
Help People

When I started I was just some guy at Ahern passing out landmarks and freebies.
Greeting people new to SL is not new it is the oldest concept going.
A "Greeter" and what a Greeter does is the heart and soul of anyone who wants to help new people. Listen, advise and help. It is a great concept.

My motto is "Instructing newbs the old fashioned way, One at a time."
quote me

Surely with the increased rate of new accounts that are created nowadays this is a pretty ineffective way of instructing new players. Maybe some sort of group instruction would be a more effective use of your time rather than one on one. I think you should re-evaluate your motto.

At least it explains why so many noobs in SL dont know their arse from their elbow if this is the way the mentors structure their tuition.

Unless Linden is planning to offer an alternative solution that provides timely person to person assistance, new residents will immediately get frustrated and write the service off within minutes of arriving in-world. Expecting noobs to wade through instructional placards, videos, and the byzantine knowledge base will not suffice.

Lets face it most noobs end up blowing through most of the help island anyway then end up naked in one of our stores, clubs even homes which force most of us into mentor mode anyway. I never had a mentor in SL but have been a mentor to many. Oh and yea.. we all know quite a few "noobs" landing there are not really noobs. We have changed their names to "Alt"

I just finished spending an hour on Help Island 219. I assisted a person who wanted their SL experience to involve interacting with Polish communities exclusively. To each his/her own. But, I digressed...

The OP was written without a grain of evidence offered, with a statement in the past tense, and with the only backup to the claim being "Lexie Linden decided".... I must assume it's false information and an attempt to misinform and confuse people. (>_<