Purpose of SL Mentors v. Lindens

For what purpose?

So I'd be able to inform residents who ask their fellow mentors when SL will have a decent sky.

Well, you wouldn't want to misinform people: if the developers themselves don't know how long it will take, then it doesn't help to be telling people that there is a date.

I think there used to be more along the lines of "we should have an upgrade to Havok 2 within a few months" a few years back, but making guesses as to how long something will take, then missing those "deadlines" was lots of trouble.

just a perspective i noticed: when i got my SL account a couple years ago, there were 8000-10000 online at any given time. now its 35-50K. my cheap math say that LL would need to hire 5 times the amount of employees to cover that?

i'd like to see LL focus their resources on infrastructure

PS i do thank you mentors for being there when i joined up

Automated translation isn't a universal panacea. Certainly, most new users who don't speak English will have a great deal of trouble sorting out confused automated translations AND at the same time learning new concepts related to SL. Plus, we really need an automated translation that has a "that's wrong, try it some other way" button

Moreover is the fact that some non-English speakers I've seen are actually offended by the use of automated translation - it tends to convey a sense of "we want to look like we're integrating with you, but we won't do any work for it".



I think this is part of a deeper problem. LL have very strict rules about what they will or will not put in standard places, like the HI Freebie Store. I actually asked if it would be possible to place a networked freebie distributor on HI, and was told that no, it couldn't be allowed, because every item would need to be Linden approved to ensure it didn't contain business landmarks or promotions or anything similar. Which is fine... except that they then have almost _no_ rules about what they'll allow an individual mentor to hand out. And that's what generates this "caught between stools" situation where individual mentors can create packs and share them privately with others, but the Lindens won't issue a standard one because then they would be responsible for it.

Are you attempting to take my thread off topic...

As for automated translations, LL should hire several proffesional translators. It would be a minor expense on their total budget, but would prove to be an enormous boon for people not of english nationality.

Yumi, I'm aware of the limitations of automated translation. But it's the best alternative we have. We can't expect every mentor to devote the hundreds or thousands of hours of study needed to master a second language! The problem is, that poor as it is, we don't even have the use of automated translation on script-disabled regions like OI.

As for the "Linden Stamp of Approval"...that fork is even sharper than you depict, because as mentors, we're not supposed to be "advertising" specific businesses while wearing our tags. In short, they DO have rules about what we're supposed to be handing out, it's just that enforcement is nonexistent. Frankly, I think LL needs to lighten up on these restrictions. Some extremely useful stuff is made by, and donated free by, a large number of SL merchants. A simple disclaimer on LL's part should be sufficient to show that they are not endorsing the product, but thank the merchants of SL for their service to newcomers.

At one end of the spectrum, we have the fully-approved content in the Library folder. It's terribly sparse and very outdated. At the other end, we have Freebie stores that sell boxed items with landmarks to the store of the contributing merchant.

Surely, there is an acceptable middle ground?

A large number of those 35k "online" residents are campers and camping zombies. (Just look at those numbers for popular places...140k traffic!!!)

As I just stated, LL would not need to hire more Lindens since most of those 35k are campers. I simply would like LL to be more focused...whether its infastructure or anything else... those mentor meetings clearly demonstrate that the Lindens can't or won't stay focused.

An IBM employee has done something along those lines.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/l-second-life-3.html

Maybe someone can incorporate such a translation system into a Open Source patch for inclusion in an LL viewer.

Why can't LL do it? Why does it always have to be the community. I don't understand why LL didn't make a translator in the first place if they wanted their game to be global.(They used the metric system but are located in Ca, USA?)

I'm only being critical of LL since I'm seing them place more and more work on the community rather than devolping their own game. Essential features are left for us to implement while they work on new, bugged features for months and years.(Windlight...Havok )

Of course we can't expect mentors to devote hundreds or thousands of hours to learning new languages. But we _could_ do more to encourage international mentors. For as long as I've known it, _all_ of the material related to applying to mentor and learning to mentor, etc, has been English only.

That's a good point, although there WERE at least a couple of international mentors in the orientation class I attended. So they are coming on board...but it's still a great idea to reach out better to the international community for volunteers, and to provide them with the tools they need, in their own language.

And, Bobby30...let's not diss LL for going metric. I would hate to have to do feet/inches/yards conversions while building. YAY, METRIC!

Mentors were paid once...? Mmmh only if it was very early in 2003... one of the first ever Mentor meetings had established that if Mentors got paid for their work, it would be abused...

I definitely agree that Mentor's issues should be freely expressed and discussed — after all, people doing so are interested in improving the Mentor system and remain inside it, not simply venting the frustration and leave...

That said, it's unfair to say that "the Lindens running the Mentor group are not doing much". In fact, they're doing astronomically more than they were doing in, say, late 2005/early 2006, and there were already 5,000 Mentors by then, desperate for more help/input/organisation. We have all that now. I wouldn't really "complain" about it.

I don't feel I'm being "used". Like all volunteering work, I do it because I like it — or else I wouldn't volunteer at all. Sure, if someone wants to make it a job out of mentoring, they can apply to become a CSI:NY Mentor, or even a Metaverse Mentor.

The biggest issue I have right now is about the communication channels. The IM Group Chat had two major functions: intra-Mentor help (nobody knows everything, and it was a very quick and efficient way to make sure you could answer newbie questions very fast by asking what you didn't know yourself), and, of course, calling for help on the several locations (Orientation Areas, Welcome Areas).

The new policy states that intra-Mentor help is not allowed on the IM Group Chat any more, and it's suggested that Mentors join other groups for that. The IM Group Chat is now supposed to be only used to ask Mentors to come over to a location and help newbies.

Now, if we had way better group tools, and no limit of groups you could join, then this suggestion would make sense. There are a dozen or so "Mentor help groups", from Scripting Mentors to Volunteer Mentors to Metaverse Mentors and Mental Mentors... and a few specialised ones, like the old Macintosh Users group (which tends to answer all sorts of questions these days).

Instead, Linden Lab is "forcing" Mentors to seek help elsewhere, outside the Mentor group. I find that very disturbing, since it's a bad solution for a very simple problem. A few years ago, there was something called the "Greeter HUD", which allowed people to call Greeters (a specialised form of Mentor) for help. The Group Chat was used mostly to deal with questions and answers; the HUD for calls for help.

LL's implementation of the HUD was very buggy (HUDs were a novelty back then) and the Greeter system was basically "shut down", but the idea might be recovered and implemented again.

All methods to get quick help to forward to newbies should be employed, but obviously, signing in to several non-official groups is not a solution. And I find it ridiculous to create something like, say, a Mentor web-based chatroom or a IRC channel to provide this service, when we have that tool in-world, but we're not allowed to use it!

Considering that the majority of questions that do come up tend to be things that would only take a few seconds to find the answer to (ie "How do I get the debug menus?" and are usually for personal help rather than actually helping someone else, I don't see much of a problem with the new guidelines though, other than the fact that it's not really enforced.

Whenever questions venture outside of the realm of "things everyone knows", people tend to get 10 widely different answers so that's not helpful then either since they have no clue who's right and who's making educated/wild guesses, and sometimes leads to an argument about who's right and who's wrong which is entirely inappropriate for the group.

I do disagree with the whole the "Ask a question in group, but IM the answer" though, and truthfully I'd much rather see the incessant "French speaking helper needed on OI x" dissapear and moved to its own group than the questions.

While most of what you said is true, their is being less input. We aren't allowed to use the group chat channel, and the meetings are simply to praise our work rather than to answer questions/generate input.

Not true. The mentor group channel is THERE for your use.

What you can't use it for is long, rambling discussions with everyone chiming in. There are over 3,000 people in the mentors group. If everyone posts just five times per day, that's one heckuva lot of group spam that shows up on a heckuva lot of screens.

The rules for the group chat are clear. Post your question, and request responses via IM, off the channel.

(There's an improvement that could be made here. To go to IM, I have to call up the person's profile first, using Search. We should be able to go to IM with the OP directly from the group chat window. Or am I missing something?)

There's a blue button to the left of the group chat window. Pressing it will show who is currently in the group chat. Simply press the first letter of that persons name and it should bring up a person whose name starts with that letter.

Off topic, but - I wish there was some sort of "Top 50 hidden features" list, because I had no idea we could do that.

I'm an SL Mentor Coach and I've helped teach a lot a lot of mentors about such features. It's rather ironic since Torely's video on tricks is ussually rather pointless.(Foot shadows anyone?)

Well... have any of you tried one of the other "helpful" IM Group Chats? Some issues are to the interest of the whole group, not just the person who made the question... an example: "how do we validate age manually?" Lots of people might be interested in those questions and answers...

Sure, we could post them on the forums... or on the wiki... but that's "background material". Often you need an answer (or several answers) *now*, not after a few hours/days.

My best sources of information used to be the SL Mentor group. Now I have to rely on other sources: Twitter, Mental Mentors, Macintosh Users group, and things like that. Even Lindens use these, semi-regularly. It's a pity, when the biggest source of information in SL, about SL, is exactly the Mentor group. Which is the only group that is forbidden to reveal/display that information *in real time* — although they can, of course, update wikis or the new Volunteer portal... when it's too late to give someone a hand!

Believe me, efficient communication in real-time cannot be understated. The reason why Mentors appear "omniscient" to newbies and other residents is because *they keep in touch* — at all times, 24/7. Losing that is simply wasting on-the-spot vital information. And for myself, I'm sad to see it go. Those were the days when we got feedback on the Mentor channel (sometimes from the Lindens) when something was going to hit the grid — a major TV show featuring SL in some country; a new update rolling out; griefer attacks; problems and difficulties with the asset servers affecting inventory.

All these sources of "instant" information were brought to you while you worked through, well, "instant messaging" — the Group IM chat — which was the first and best updated source.

Sure, long-winded philosophical discussions (like this one!) is best held on the forums, or possibly on in-world meetings (or a complement of both). But real-time information on what's going on in SL requires, well, real-time updating.

I'm not trying to nit-pick (well, maybe a little bit since it fits my point ), but a simple search on "age verification" in the KB will answer that question right away.

I don't think the group should be silent, and there are hundreds of things that aren't on the KB, or help, or the wiki, but the reality still is that 9/10 questions fall in the "it would take 5 seconds to find the answer to that".

I've seen people IM the mentor group to ask for a landmark to somewhere. It would take less time to type the name in search and tp there.

When a group balloons in terms of members and people fail to self-moderate themselves then you do need the rules we have today because otherwise people are going to turn in their mentor cap just to get rid of the chat. Even a request from a Linden to quiet down doesn't work anymore half the time until they repeated themselves 6 times.

(And yes, I'm hypocritical since I'll just answer any question right in the group when they pop up and I know the answer since I do think that seeing it answered helps far more people than just the person who asked)

That's not hypocritical, Kitty. That's good judgement.

The group chat rules permit you to use your judgement. That allows for the real time info, and the answers with wide application that Gwyneth talked about.

It's just important to think for a second before hitting the Send key: "Is Group Chat the right place for this message?"

I did mentoring from about November 2005 until April 2006. At the outset it was actually quite good fun, and primarily consisted of helping newbies acquire basic skills and giving advice. As time went on it became less and less a help function for new players, and more and more a sort of unpaid brainwashing agent for Linden Lab, in which the primary function appeared to be to help turn newbies into nice fine upstanding Linden-approved citizens. It certainly did appear that the mentor scheme was being used in place of Linden Labs own customer service, and the overall attiude that mentor's should in some way be "grateful" to have the role basically made me want to throw up.

What really was the nail in the coffin, as far as I was concerned, was when volunteers who had devoted massive amounts of their free time to making the mentor scheme work were effectively booted out by Linden Lab in order to allow a largely ineffective "Linden" to come in and take all the credit.

At the point I chucked it in.

It is a great shame, because the initial idea of helping newbies acquire skills is a good one. But the fact that it all has to be turned into some pathetic Linden approved social engineering experiement really irritated me, and to this day, fast approaching 3 years in SL, my one big regret is that I expended one moment of my time on the Linden Mentor scheme. Linden Lab's loss; not mine.

Heya, wanted to address a few points brought up here, as there is some great discussion happening...

The "new" volunteer program is coming up on a year old, and we've implemented lots of what we knew would be necessary for scaling the system to accommodate what was a backlog of thousands of applicants who, by the then-current prerequisites, were to be accepted (The group entry requirements have been raised for new applicants). There have definitely been growing pains, as the ongoing discussions of how the chat channel should be used shows, but that's to be expected. If you haven't stopped by my office hour (Wednesdays at 4 SLTime) please do...chat channel use is a not infrequent topic

One of the things that the new volunteer program is meant to accomplish is to provide for what volunteers have oft requested, which is to acknowledge the range of ways in which people would like to help, rather than simply being asked to greet people in the new user areas. The removal of Live Help from the client was a very painful change for a lot volunteers whose high level of SL proficiency enabled them to chime in and answer questions on a huge number of issues posed by the box-head and power user alike. Roles like Linguist and Coaches are a shift of responsibility from Linden to Mentor, yes...a shift that had been requested, debated and implemented.

Of course, like every aspect of this program, participation is voluntary...you being volunteers. If there are things you don't want to do, that's great. I've seen a couple of highly valuable volunteers burn themselves out which is going too far, whether your donating your time to RL or SL causes. You can't further your goals or the goals of the team if you can no longer contribute. If it's not providing value to you....don't do it! Take a break and come back later. I know that should go without saying, but it bears repeating.

The general topics in this thread aside, let me address a few points more specifically...

"All I ask is that the lindens partake in what should be their business and hire more lindens."

We did! In the past, the volunteer program was run by one Linden...the most awesome Jeska, and then later, the dynamic Pathfinder. We understood that this couldn't last forever and we'd have to discontinue the program or bring more Lindens on board. This year saw the creation of the VTeam, comprised of Amber, George, Lexie, Mia, and myself. Clearly SL doesn't have an infinite budget, so for the time being you'll have to settle for a 500% improvement ;p

"Meetings which once held question periods(and the lindens answered them) now instead are used for promoting morale in these meetings."

Actually the meetings still have Q&A periods that comprise 1/4 to a full 1/2 of the meeting. Because we saw the value of this kind of back and forth with you, and questions sometimes range into the technical (you really don't want me pretending to know technical stuff) we have started, just this quarter, what we call the Q&A Series bringing Lindens from specific departments to the SL Volunteer Islands to explain their projects and do extended Q&A specifically for you, the Mentors. So far, the Lindens involved in the Q&A Series has reported that these meetings have been of great value, and the feedback from you has been outstanding, as you know best how you use SL.

Of course, if you are not finding value in the meetings, which are designed to give you updates on the state of the program, and not to teach mentoring, then you can feel free to skip them, although we certainly do appreciate your participation. As I may have mentioned, your participation in any part of the volunteer program remains....voluntary!

"And Blue was (Busy) for the first 20minutes of the meeting. "

Yes, that's because I get on average 3,683,122 IMs when I log in and wanted to focus my attention specifically on the meeting at hand, without being rude to my adoring fans ;p

Oh yeah, to those of you who stop by my office hour on Wednesdays to talk volunteer program stuff...THANKS! To those who don't...do!




<edit> Oh, and mentors were never paid, just FYI

Thanks muchies for that, Blue .

& yay for braving the forums! .