Help or Orientation Island chat channel

I have made a feature suggestion in the feature suggestion fourm Help or Orientation Islands chat channel.

The idea is to make it is possible for new arrivals to ask someone on Help Island for help without having to find them first.

Couldn't we just tell them what LiveHelps for?

It is my understanding that Live Help volunteers are often busy, sometimes doing things that require their presence on the scene of a problem.

Live Help calls only directly reach the Live Help volunteers, and most mentors are not also Live Help volunteers. While there is always supposed to be at least one Linden employee listening in to the Live Help calls, Live Help volunteers are volunteers, hence the presence of one is not guaranteed.

The Lindens listening in on the Live Help calls won't necessarily relay a request for help from a new member quickly. They have others things to do, other calls to answer.

The idea is to provide n response to people who have just entered and may be having severe technical problems that could be answered - if the volunteers on Help Island, who are there precisely to help new arrivals with problems such as that, only knew about the problem.

A delay of minutes may lose a customer who could have been hooked with a faster response.

I'll support this if it's not another dang group slot thingie.

This brings me to the question about the number of groups allowed. Is there any way that any of the SL volunteer groups could be 'freebies"? Everyone is allowed 15 groups. Couldn't the people that are doing 'a little extra', be allowed 'a little extra'?

The chat system needs to be overhauled, for sure. Just another group is not what had in mind.

I have a fear that the 15 limit comes from some data structure using 4 bits to store some part of the group data.

The limit, if there must be one, needs to be at least a hundred, with the ability to turn off the chat by group, and to not have the group chat show in the normal local chat display, Also need to be able to click on people you see and form a chat channel easily from that.

I think an ideal solution would be to combine the Greeter and Mentor channels into one Volunteer Channel and put up kiosks at HI that allow a lost newbie to pop into the channel and ask for help.

Yesterday I was asked by a new arrival how to contact his greeter. Of course they didn't know the greeter's name. The greeter might have been on help island, as they sometimes are, but I had no way to know.

As a mentor I can access the Mentor group chat - although the last official statement I know of about mentors actually using the mentor chat is that we aren't supposed to make any use of it all - it is only for us to hear directives from above. That policy seems to have in fact gone by the wayside, as mentors do make use of it.

Had I used the Mentor chat it would make messages go out to all the Mentors who are not on the entry island complex, but are elsewhere hanging out, running their business, dancing, etc.

One might say contact Live Help, and I did tell the new member to do so. I also asked the asked this question in Live Help. I got no answer, not even an "I don't know".

Help Island and the Orientation Islands are too big to see well. The green dots on the map don't tell if you are looking at a new user or a volunteer. There are Mentors, Live Helpers, Greeters, and perhaps the Instructor group as well, with access to the entry area and those group chats don't work together.

The entry islands are geographically isolated and serve a special purpose. They need a chat system that is also isolated and made to serve a special purpose.