How many ?

How many of you think that this is the best way to instruct newbies coming into secondlife who have no idea what they are doing. Do you think it is best to have people on the Landing points ie.... Help islands?.

I think the best way is to get some OIs that work well, some smarter code in the guts of SL to populate each private OI with 2-3 newbies and reinstate the mentor group.

Aren't there people voluntarily and unofficially mentoring?

I've always wanted to take a newbie under my tutelage for a while to get them on their feet. But then I wouldn't know how best to go about it or where to begin. When would it become intrusive? How would one know the person is really a newbie? I guess if they ask stuff, that's a clue, huh?

If you're just hanging out at welcome areas, how would they know to ask you questions?


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The original idea of help island wit ppl approved to be there i think was the best. The open ones get many who want to do the BL vamp thing getting them before they know whats what. I thought at the time with Help island would of been if ppl had to pass the basics as in some form of a game before they could get onto the real SL. If this was done then we would not have to explain how to unbox, how to dress and the many other things we get asked. I dont mind helping but if this could be done first it may help them also enjoy SL more and not feel so frustrated

Yes there are people voluntarily mentoring but have you really stood on a help island and listened to the new residents?

I do all the time, they have no concept of what they are doing or where they are going.

Newbies do ask the most mundane questions at times, but myself, who has made an alt and left it on one of the help islands for the purpose of helping the new residents find that "The green mentor", which is a board which when clicked links to the question and answer page, find that it will take the new residents a lot longer to gain information. Whereas if there was someone there they could get the answer within seconds. Thats my point....

I think it needs some core UI changes. Plus it needs some clear objectives on login.

UI:
1. Point-click, auto-walk movement, and mouse turning, like an MMO. This is so fundamental it shocks me everytime I log in that SL lacks the method common in nearly if not ALL other 3D environments. I should be able to walk all over the place without ever using my keyboard.

2. Keybind re-mapping. This is for the pro-users. But its just basic anyway.

3. Remove pie-menu, make it buttons on the screen. Doesn't matter if pie is less clutter, buttons are more familiar.

4. Built in AO that you just 'drag and drop' animations into and easy configure cycling or random.

5. Chat windows / group chat needs to not show that scrolling update if minimized or closed - so that people stop discouraging gossip in groups.

6. Double profiles. Let us flag a rating on a profile - PG, Mature, Adult. If anything other than PG, we also need to make a PG profile to be shown in general and website search (we could leave it blank of course, but it would exist nonetheless).

7. Optional avatar-maturity-flag. If you choose to flag your avatar as PG or adult, you cannot enter an area rated the other way - on purpose or on accident - unless you remove the flag. This would just help prevent all those accidents where you TP into candyland and its not that kind of candy, though they do have candy-strippers...
- By contrast all avatars, unflagged or flagged, could move about mature with no issues.


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Objectives:

1. Let me 'search my address book' and find friends who are already in SL (only those who -OPT-IN- to being found this way. Likewise, on creating an avatar, pop up a thing that says 'type in emails of friends here who you want to meet you in SL' and it will email an invite to create an SL account to those emails (this would need some kind of anti-spam protection though).
- OPT-IN is very critical here. I myself would not opt-in to this, but I think it would really help bring a lot more people to SL, and keep them here.

2. Group creation - when making a group, pick whether it is business, shopping, education, social, land, or other. Sort groups in categories under search with this, and it will also help members know that, for example, mindless babbling about nothing is ok in a social group, but not in a business one.

3. On avatar creation, before logging in, get a choice for how to log in: Category based guided tour (business, edu, social, gamer, etc?), take me to X (you put in X), Choice of welcome area.
- take me to X would be useful if you're doing a business meeting in SL and just want all the employees to be in Sim X on time. Also for alts... The tours would be 'MMO quest like' 1-2 hour things that walk you through that kind of use of SL in a controlled environment. The choice of welcome area would warn you that you're going for an unguided self-service intro, and may find yourself lost.

4. I know it sounds stupid... but an actual achievements system seems to be amazingly handy in many other platforms at getting people active and involved. Categorize them by maturity rating, nature, and so on... but make them:
'Earned a Linden in a contest.'
'Held a contest'
'DJ'd a live event'
'bounced pixels.'
'created a prim'
'sold a personal creation'
'bought something inworld'
- whatever...

Create some system where users can create achievements and put things on the ends of them to monitor progress and give out a success at the end. A great example is a hunt.
- to get the 'Holloween Bunny' achievement you have to collect the 'bunny' 25 times. Each store in the hunt rezzes a bunny, puts their hunt items in it, and the script inside of it tracks progress for collectors.
- to get the supreme angler achievement, those 7sea people could put something into each fish you catch. After a 1000, progress tracks up and you get the achievement.
- etc... all user made.

It could be done now by clever scriptors, but it the Lindens put in a backbone for it, we could see it on a tab in people's profiles, and that would get the newbies really going.

I used to be a mentor - in a group designed to help newbies. I had to stand at Mahulu lioek a doorknob and say welcome to sl. Welcome areas quickly become bitch sessions. Bitch sessions.

I have taken many newbies "under my tutelage" - given them money - lotsa money - and seen them on their way. Not many say thank you Jig. Most ignore or unfriend me when they realize they have a debt to repay and they are cheap bastards or bastardettes. I have lent money to avatars who have critiqued me horribly in forum who were once newbs. I'll never tutor a newb again.

Newbs can survive on their own or sink on their own. This is secondlife for god's sake not New York City. You'd have to be retarded to not understand what is goign on and how to exist here.

Personally I will never help a newb ever again. They can survive on their own. My "family" in sl are who I look after. They know who they are. I protect and help them in our own group. The rest of the newbie nation can bugger off.

I never once was approached by a Mentor when I was brand new. In fact I can't say I've seen more than a couple in my entire life in SL. I came here late 2005..........when the Welcome areas were supposed to be loaded helpers of all kinds. No one offered help. I had to ask or learn on my own. I finally found The Shelter and NCI...........and that is where I started to learn.

Guess what.............I survived. The determined or the reasonably intelligent will get along just fine.

Just to add to this. I mentored for a while cos I was so disappointed with the snotty bastards who were mentors when I came on line. I thought I could do it better than them. Supercilious sods.

But that's not the target audience.

And you may have never met up with a mentor in-world but I think you've dealt with plenty of us here in the forums over the years.

Actually the last question I asked in any SL forum was in the Linden Answers section..........long closed now. And the person answering 99% of the question was the one and only Torely Linden........he was not a mentor.

My statement stands.........a mentor has never offered any help to me. NEVER.

Well, I do have to wonder what my motivation was for even wistfully considering mentoring. I might have been just being a guy, subconsciously thinking "That girl next door avatar isn't too bad. Maybe Newbie-barbiedoll2341 Paperclip will be really grateful and . . ."

Or maybe I thought it might be a way to relive my own first days and the sense of wonder that came with them.

But, yeah. I doubt it's what I'm looking for.

Anyone tried pressing F1 in the SL viewer lately?

When you expand the "Second Life For Beginners" topic you see one sub-listing:

When you click on that sub-listing you are told:




In the FAQs section you find the following FAQs listed:



That is not a very impressive list of FAQs. Somehow I doubt that numerical limits are one of the things most often causing confusion during the first hour experience.

In the Menus and Controls section the first page of results is:



Is the Advanced Sky Editor really what the average new user needs to see immediately upon looking for help with menus?

Under "Second Life Software Questions" you see


In the "Optional Viewers" section of that you see:


Does the new user really need to see info about the obsolete "First Look" viewer?


That F1 Help could use some improvement. A lot of improvement. The old F1 help, updated, would be better. It should be something actually written by a human being, not a computer generated list of search results or a random listing of disjointed articles ordered without a bit of thought for what new users need to see.

I tried this expecting to get a much better result than what I actually got. It's really quite pitiful.

I was not a mentor but a greeter my job was to stand there welcome ppl and help them with any questions. There would be a few mentors there but most of the time it was us who new ppl came across first

I generally agree with this, and I tend to think that if someone can work out how to switch on a computer, they have enough intelligence to work some things out for themselves. Second Life is undoubtedly quite a complicated "game" (I know, I know, it is NOT a "game" - believe me I KNOW!!).

LL had very good reasons for disbanding the official Mentor groups, and although I know most were good people, I also knew of a couple who had their own agenda and used the title of Mentor to build up trust in people, but who ended up falling foul of the AR system because of violations against ToS.

I remember my first fortnight stumbling around as a newbie with other newbies, and we had a LOT of fun and a fair amount of frustration, trying to figure out how to look better, do things, discover new places. We explored, we camped, we met other residents old and new; some were helpful, some were hostile. I thought that was the point of Second Life - its an adventure, a learning curve.

I suppose my main mentor is my SL partner. He "fine tuned" me, and taught me some basic building skills and some useful shortcuts, but never has had the need to go "Look At Me I am Great, I am a Mentor, Appointed by LL". But then I have also taught him some things.

If you really want to be a Mentor, nothing stops you, but if you need to be a Mentor and do it because you need to be displaying a Linden group tag as a "badge of honor" to feed your own ego, well, as the song says, it don't impress me much!

I never encountered any sort of helper, mentor or greeter in my early days either, but that was ok by me. I prefer to learn things onmy own. I just went about SL after a ouple of hours on OI and just did stuff. I would find quiet spots and just start experimenting. I found NCI and read what was to offer there as well as here on the forum. That was pretty much it.

A lot of people don't like to learn that way, and the people that do give of their time to help people are great. But to be truthful, I I had been approach by a mentor upon arriving, I'd probably wouldhave politely declined their off. Just like when I walk into a store and a salesclerk immediately approaches me, I always politely decline.

I think SL needs better self help resources for new residents.

As far as newbie orientation goes, I think the Lindens should set up more places along the lines of the University of Caledon Oxbridge. The layout works really well with clear instructions, freebies and even temporary room and board. They could design a variety of layouts on different themes and different languages and, perhaps more to the importantly, keep folk there for a few days before letting them in-world.

I don't mind helping out with some pointers and tips but it surely pisses me when I learn that a newbie doesn't know how to rez an object or find his/her inventory because they first logged on less than an hour prior to our meeting.

just to make one thing perfectly clear:

as long as there's a constant stream of "new" newbies coming in because they read something about pixel sex in the national enquirer, linden labs has NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER in actually making it easier for new "players" to live&learn the ins&outs.
All that matters to them, to be able to brag, strut & taunt, is the "new user signups this month" number.

Seen last night, at a place that advertizes itself as "The most romatic place in SL"...


they could at least restrain the damn noobs at HI / II for long enough to teach them that contrary to common belief, clothing is generally NOT "optional but frowned upon".

There are a lot of us, Weston. What I used to do is wear a titler...it said, "Ask Me For a Free Newbie Kit!" I hung out at newbie areas, mostly OI Public (not a good place to find newbies these days, though), and gave a copy of Lucrezia Lamont's newbie kit to anyone who asked. If you don't have a newbie kit, make one. Include some helpful notes and useful items for new residents.

It's easy to tell a newbie. They are almost certainly wearing one of the starter avatars. I also always check their Profile for the rez date. If it's a week or less in the past, they are a noob. Unless they are an alt, and they'll usually tell you that in the first couple of exchanges.

When you hang out at a newbie area, and hear someone asking questions, or see them trying to do something, like open a box or change clothes, strike up a conversation. Being a dog is a great conversational opener...if you wag and give a friendly sniff, and don't pee on their leg.

Another thing I did was make an alt and leave her on the initial Help Island. This isn't as good as being an official Mentor, because there aren't always newbies on any given HI. But it does give you access to people in the first hour of their SL experience.

LOL well....LL is never going to get around that issue......there's always going to be the freaks and wingnuts who will get involved in something for all the wrong reasons.

but anyway....I used to be a mentor.....I always enjoy helping people.......but it became a chore dealing with the other wackos who hung around just to harass the newbies. Eventually I lost my mentor status because I guess I wasn't attending enough mentor meetings. It's too bad...tho it was a flawed system for the simple fact there's just no way to regulate human behavior (entirely)

It did just occur to me while reading this post.... that it might be nice if LL provided a basics manual in PDF form when one applied for their account. Then again, some people, no matter what you give them, don't want to be bothered with directions. I learned on my own....I didn't find it too difficult at all......I found it all to be very logical.

The irony tho.....is that there a LOT of very intelligent people who have absolutely zero skill sets for manipulating in a cyber community. Actually....I've come across some highly intelligent people who can't even be bothered to learn the most basic computer program. My boss is a stellar example. She's a programmer/consultant by trade......she can write a program to do just about anything you could imagine.....she's a genius with the complexities of computer languages. But ask her to use quickbooks....or the software we use to run our spa.......and oh my gawd.......she is clueless! She is so not good at repetative basic tasks that after 4 months with a new software that she insisted we get for our business......every staff member except her, can operate it flawlessly.

I guess my point being that learning is a very different process for everyone.....we all perceive information slightly differently....and we all come to an understanding about things based on very different queues in our reasoning. So....I can almost understand LL's throwing up their hands about the whole newbie initiation phase....because it's pretty much impossible to expect everyone to learn a new skill with a single tutorial style. Not only are they dealing with different personalities and learning types....but with different languages and cultural types......good gawd... it's a nightmare just thinking about it.

This sums it up perfectly

Peeing on their leg is probably not what they're worried about.

Did you enjoy your mentoring? Was it gratifying?

I still enjoy it