Problem with Portal at Starting Point

[VermithraxPejorative]

OK I just joined today so I'm pretty clueless.:matte-motes-smile: I do have a helper, but she's pretty new as well. At my first a big I went to a place with a number of portals which was as I expected. My helper led me to believe that walking through a portal would take me to a place related to my interest and that would become my home place. I chose the Art portal, but was transported to an empty place called Born. There was a Church area nearby but nothing related to art really. Not a populated place I was led to expect. After exploring a bit I logged off. When I returned, choosing "Home" as where to login, I was taken to the same place as before, however this time I received a message that my home place was not available and that I was placed in a nearby region.

So, I am wondering where it is that my home is actually set and where was the portal supposed to send me. Does it no longer exist? Not a big deal but I was wondering.

Now, besides curiosity, I assumed maybe I should let Second Life know that my home was unavailable. Perhaps there's a problem with that place or the portal is malfunctioning. So I attempt to contact support about it but there seems to be no category for such a report. There was an option to report an offline region. Perhaps that would apply, but I have no idea what region it would be nor how to find out. So there seems to be only very few things they want people to report?

So anyway, if someone can shed some light on this, I would appreciate it!

I did find a link here to the Welcome Island which looks like a good place to start out so i will check that out.

[Charolotte Caxton]

Your Home can only be set to land you own, group land that you belong to that allows you to set it as Home, or Info Hubs.

Setting home and login locations

 

[Rolig Loon]

Welcome to Second Life, Vermi.  You seem to have missed reading some of the startup materials that might help, so take a look at these.....

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Second-Life-Quickstart/ta-p/1087919

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Second-Life-User-s-Guide/ta-p/1244857

It's usually a good idea to head for a quiet welcome area rather than one of the overcrowded ones that sometimes have pranksters waiting for you.  Next time you log in to Second Life, type this line into your Chat bar ...... http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Virtual%20Ability/127/131/23   and then hit Enter.  If you open your chat window, you'll see it there as a highlighted message.  If you double click on it, you will be teleported to Virtual Ability island, which has one of the nicest orientation programs in SL and is NOT crowded.

To clear up your first confusion....  You have a default "Home" when you first enter Second Life.   (Mine was a Japanese bus station.  I never did figure out why.)  As Charolotte says, you will be able to reset your Home location later to a place that you like better.  It's not a place where you "live."   It's just a spot where you can login to, or where you can return to easily.  The message you received was simply a standard message telling you that for technical reasons, that particular spot was temporarily off line.  Linde Lab techies were probably doing maintenance on the servers.  When that happens, anyone trying to login to that spot is sent to another location instead.  It's no big deal.

BTW, Other than Virtual Ability island, I would suggest looking for Caledon Oxbridge University when you learn how to use your Search function.  They have a full schedule of classes in SL skills -- all free --- that you may find helpful.

Enjoy Second Life.  :smileywink:

[Charolotte Caxton]

You do not get a default home. Pressing Ctrl Shift H will teleport you to random Info Hubs .Logging in to My Home (without a Home location set) will give you the error message: Home location not currently available. You have been moved into a nearby region, etc. Those locations seem to be random as well.

[Rolig Loon]

<sigh> The old system was dumb enough. Why did they bother making it dumber? Thanks, Charolotte.

[Charolotte Caxton]

I don't mean to correct you, I just thought you would like to know

[Rolig Loon]

No, that's fine. We're all here to learn, and the rules change often enough that nobody can keep all of them straight, even with cheat sheets. We have to count on each other for the collective wisdom.. I'm too old to get offended when someone shows me a better answer.

[Theresa Tennyson]

You won't actually have a "home" until you set one - right now your "home" isn't available because you don't really HAVE one.. Previously the viewer would drop you into one of a series of "welcome centers" which have long ago devolved into the equivalent of crack alleys outside of urban bus stations because people who think it's fun to abuse new people gravitated there to harass those sent there automatically. Now I believe the viewer just logs you into the same location you logged out of previously but the error message wasn't changed. For the time being you'd be better served by going into "Preferences" - "General" and changing "Start Location" from "My Home" to "My Last Location." To find places to explore you can try the "Destinations" button.