Nobody goes to the Community Exhibition in WelcomeHub.

[Persephone Emerald]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

This is why we created International Bazaar at the infohub in Ross, so that people can be directed to RL language/country sims where there are those who speak their language.

Is the information at the Ross Bazaar up to date? I think it's a great resource for newbies, but I thought many Muslim groups and sims, for instance, left SL after experiencing harassment and prejudice from some SL users.

Edited February 21 by Persephone Emerald

[Prokofy Neva]

18 hours ago, Charlemagne Allen said:

How to tell an alt, based on the experience of someone who spends hours of my life on hubs and helps new people:

1. They have updated their avatar in any way within a day and it looks normal and it is not a rip. Noobs do not get the SL inventory.  Even noobs from IMVU who use a YouTube video guide do not get it without being explained.

2. They have a profile picture or text in their profile and they have more than one group that isn't a free body or newbie group.

3. They either stay for days in one place (bot) or immediately get out of the newbie hub.

4. They favor system bodies and it looks well put-together. That is an oldbie returning.

 

There are a number of other ways. I will not reveal them, however. 

[Midnoot]

12 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

There are a number of other ways. I will not reveal them, however. 

Don't make them stronger. D:<

[Prokofy Neva]

12 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Is the information at the Ross Bazaar up to date? I think it's a great resource for newbies, but I thought many Muslim groups and sims, for instance, left SL after experiencing harassment and prejudice from some SL users.

Yes, of course it's up to date. I work at this quite a bit, and occasionally have a bit of help. There are one or two cards that are impossible to keep up to date, recommendations of which stores or clubs to go to, but I do get to them fairly often. The International Bazaar with the country/language sims is a constant chore and never done but I work at batches at a time.

It's not true that "many Muslim groups and sim" left SL due to October 7. In fact, they left long, long before that, and not because they were harassed necessarily, but because they are often from poor countries where people do not have the money to pay for SL in any way. Or they may be in rich countries but don't have the cash themselves. It's incredibly hard to keep up sims and communities, and it's not only Muslim sites but all kinds of sites which I could describe to you as having died out in recent years, to the point that entire countries which used to have thriving hangouts have now all gone under.

If you want to have a real conversation about Muslims in SL, I can contribute to this knowledgeably, but the forums is not the place to have it successfully.

I will say, every single day, people come to the Ross Mosque to pray. It is the only working mosque in SL to my knowledge. In fact out of all the Land Preserve sites, which a number of people have helped, the religious sites attract the most visitors and most support because spiritual practices and belief systems are important for many people in RL and they want them in virtuality as well, perhaps even more so.

Every day, for many years, I have had some of the same people also leave small donations at the mosque. I had never studied the profiles of these people in the past, but did when all donations and visits ceased October 7 with a bang, I did. It turned out many were not even in the Middle East, but in South Asia. It's not that these people were killed -- it doesn't work that way, as very few if any people from the actual area of conflict come on SL. It's not that they were harassed in SL -- where is that happening? There would have to be a place for them to have this happen and I certainly don't allow that on my sims and have had zero reports of this.

No, it's that at times like this, people's thoughts and actions are elsewhere than SL -- understandably.

The small donations there are greater there than even some of our Christian or Buddhist sites, actually, but not enough to pay the tier even of the land it is on, let alone all the land related to this infohub, which is in an old program of Linden telehubs-turned-infohubs which are set to a group of residents willing to keep to provide orientation content.

I decided what's more important now than my tier for that location is to have donations to go to Palestinian relief, so that's what I have now, and visitors have picked up again recently as have donations for relief, which I have sent myself in RL. Generally, I don't think raising money for charity in SL is warranted because of the cost of having to cash out the Lindens, then get it to the recipients. But some people have small amounts of Lindens from inworld jobs or sales or whatever and why not collect them, eventually over time it will add up to US $20 to send -- and while you've lost some of them trying to get it out of SL, you wouldn't have made it otherwise, neither would they.

 

 

 

[Sid Nagy]

4 minutes ago, Midnoot said:

Don't make them stronger. D:<

They will not listen anyhow.

[Polenth Yue]

The biggest use of the community area isn't people who started today, because most people don't focus on that in the first five minutes. The point where it's useful is later, when they're set up, and they post in the make friends forum saying they want to find places. In the past, the main browsable community thing was the birthday, but it only runs for a short time each year. This will always be there.

However, it won't really live up to that until it's finished. Right now, it's basically a placeholder with only a few spaces filled.

To clarify for people who didn't realise how it was set up, there's a whole region and a connecting bridge with empty spaces ready for community exhibits. The bit you can currently see is a tiny starting part, where the bridge joins the main hub.

[Viola Mole]

Hi again! 

Your responses and posts are really appreciated, thank you.

The new Welcome HUB could prove successful or not. However, I can say that the team is highly committed to improving and iterating on the Welcome Hub experience. Only time will tell (but things do take time). Anyone who wants to try to contribute to providing a safe and welcoming environment for new users are very welcome there. 

Also welcome are your ideas on this forum. I have noted everything suggested so far, I will listen to what you have to say, think about what you have to say and take on topic observations and comments to discussion at my level (which may lead to other things). If any other relative forums pop up going forward please let me know, I would really like to read all feedback which may help us with any ideas.

We may not be able to change things immediately, we may not be able to change or implement some, even many things at all for either logistical or other reasons. 

But we will certainly listen.

Finally, about the mentors - for those of us who have a long memory, this is not 2007 - 2009.  Please give them your support. Thank you.

Looking forward to reading more of your ideas.

Kind regards,

Viola.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 2/20/2024 at 1:28 PM, Viola Mole said:

Hello folks! One of our team alerted me to this forum, they were very upset actually. There are some comments in this forum which make me understand why.

 

Everyone has their view of what can or should be done differently or better and people will gladly listen to helpful suggestions from different perspectives. This can help us all make positive developments.

 

Builds and exhibits are fluid, can be changed, rethought, improved, reduced and expanded. Perhaps though, you could have some consideration for the feelings of the creators who have worked so hard to make what many people do consider a great starting point for newcomers, including having consideration for the Community Exhibition builders who have so positively entered into this initial stage.

 

What cannot be changed however - is the gut wrenching feeling that a kind, caring person who wants to spend time with others and assist them gets in the pit of their stomach while reading insulting comments about themselves and their helping companions. Demoralization takes a lot of coming back from.

 

Rather than take a swipe at people you do not know, or at a group about which you know nothing, please be kind enough to direct any of your complaints or comments about the volunteers directly to me rather than unfairly putting people down in a public forum.

 

One thing I can assure you all about, is that in the eight months this mentor team has been together, not one person has spoken unkindly about anyone they have met or helped and we try to accept everyone, taking into account their weakness and strengths. If people fail to keep these standards they will not remain in the program. 

 

I am very proud of the people in this new generation of Second Life Mentors. Gentle Heron is an honorary member, some of our members are from Virtual Ability.  We have linguists and people with fantastic Second Life skills and we also have people who are just caring, who love to connect and spend time with others. Most of our volunteers spend many hours helping newcomers in a variety of ways.

 

I would ask you all to remember that across any demographic, newcomers, visiting residents and volunteers who might all meet up at the Welcome HUB that some people face significant life challenges.

 

Anyone can help someone else anywhere at any time, in fact, if people did not help each other in all aspects of life, life expectancy would be shorter, people's mental health would be worse and both the real world and our Second Life worlds would fall apart. 

 

Please do not belittle those who choose to do it in an organized environment as a team, learning from and supporting each other.

 

Nobody spends more time than me with the volunteers, or at the Welcome HUB, therefore I would be glad to talk to anyone about their queries. 

 

I would however ask that you come as 'yourself' not as a pretend new user. 

 

I prefer voice but do of course take into consideration people who may not be able to or wish to use it for various reasons.

 

You can also email me - violamole.ldpw@gmail.com

 

I see people on this forum with amazing skills. Bring them to the table, we will find you a newcomer who you can spend time with showing them your creations, helping them become body beautiful or help them with scripting and building. Let me know you are willing, we will link you up!

 

Let's be positive and grateful for all we have here in Second Life and provide ideas and suggestions in an emotionally intelligent way, otherwise please let those of us who are positive and grateful 'do our thing'  to the best of our own individual abilities.

 

Thank you and have an amazing day.

 

Viola.

 

Viola, I appreciate your statement here. 

It's not that our memories are long and go back even to 2004 in my case.

It's that our memories are very fresh from this week, last month, late last year when these various Welcome Area type experiments and capers have been done, including this latest Exhibition one. And the same problems keep arising with Mentors that we all see with our own eyes and report if not on forums where it is discouraged, elsewhere inworld or on blogs. The same rake keeps getting stepped on.

I'm quite happy to say that any of us only have anecdotal experience. Obviously server-side, you see a bigger picture. But our impressions are still valid. I could rehearse the list again but it won't make a difference.

What's more operative here:

I've been in all kinds of RL jobs and people often put the volunteers and interns on the intake of clients or the phone answering or the complaint answering or the orientation -- and it's a mistake in RL as in SL. 

You need full-time, paid, benefited, appreciated, compensated, monitored, in-depth staff on this job that keeps failing. Obviously you can't put such expensive resources in every WA or infohub. But you CAN have them circuit-ride.

If you can't muster that, then take the 1099 employees, the Moles, who are at least paid something for their hard work although not what they are worth and take them OFF moderating the forums where their talents are wasted and put them on welcome areas and infohubs.

Who are you moderating the forums for, Viola? The less than 5% of the user base (40,000 concurrency) that reads them and the less than 1% out of that 5% who post on them? Meanwhile, retention is less than one in ten, and that's where the company's efforts should be applied.

And there is one simple, simple, simple thing you can do that I have mentioned her, in tickets, in Voice during the MonCierge meetings, but to no avail and that is...

...turn on the damn "SET HOME TO HERE" on every damn infohub. 

Your reasoning for not doing this is utterly obscure. To prevent griefing? Then why don't you turn it off everywhere? It's on some, and not others, both old and new. It was *deliberately* turned off in some infohubs/welcome areas for reasons that are entirely mysterious -- this is not a scripting or coding glitch. It was done deliberately.

I thought at first you did this on the legacy Mainland because you want to drive people to your new shiny Belli hubs away from the old disliked Mainland? Except you didn't even turn it on at your brand new ones. Huh?

When people click "set home to here" -- even on the old Mainland -- it gives the error message "You can't do this except on the Mainland"...where they are. At the very least, fix that silly error message. But better yet, turn on "Set Home to Here" on every Linden property, bar none.

SET HOME TO HERE enables people to return, to find places they can't remember, to get back to orientation, to stick.  One of the questions I answer MOST at the little infohubs I run is "How do I get out of here?" and then five minutes later "How do I get back there?"

Just do it. It does not affect griefing one way or the other. Perhaps LL needs to get rid of their memories of 2007-2009 and the "wallsitters" and the "cagers" who don't even exist any more. There is a different kind of problem at every infohub and that's a certain kind of worker. It's like "broken windows" theory of policing. Set Home to Here does not encourage delinquents -- it helps the area become normalized and monitored and filled with other people besides trouble-makers.

 

Edited February 22 by Prokofy Neva

[Rowan Amore]

Can someone get @Viola Molea Mole tag, please?  @Quartz Moleor @Dyna Mole   😁.    She's hardly a New Resident.

[Porky Gorky]

Who are these mole people? Are they forum mods or something more special? Someone please catch me up on the mole people origin story, thanks!

[Quartz Mole]

58 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Can someone get @Viola Molea Mole tag, please?  @Quartz Moleor @Dyna Mole   😁.    She's hardly a New Resident.

I've asked for this to be fixed.   Thanks for pointing it out.

[Dyna Mole]

19 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

Someone please catch me up on the mole people origin story, thanks!

See https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Department_of_Public_Works for all sorts of fascinating information.  Well, not all sorts, but some of the fundamental stuff.

[Simo Vodopan]

31 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

Who are these mole people? Are they forum mods or something more special? Someone please catch me up on the mole people origin story, thanks!

Moles are like the DOT (Department of Transportation) of Second Life. They tend to road-ways and other public areas. While they don't have the same power of authority of a Linden they can report an offense to a Linden and then the Linden comes out to investigate.

[UnilWay SpiritWeaver]

13 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

There are a number of other ways. I will not reveal them, however. 

Alts already know the handshake:

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, UnilWay SpiritWeaver said:

Alts already know the handshake:

I kin dew that to!

 

[xDancingStarx]

On 2/21/2024 at 5:08 AM, Zalificent Corvinus said:

On 2/21/2024 at 3:21 AM, Jaylinbridges said:

The forums would be more pleasant to discuss everything if a few were not here.

Providing you only want to discuss "how great every thing is, and perfect, with no problems whatsoever".

Since the very first mentioning of the new mentor program there have been people who right out *hated* the fact that there would be new mentors, some characterizing potential new mentors as power hungry selfish people, a program that is deemed to fail. I'm not a mentor so I feel completely free to speak about this. And you could see these posts since the very first thread. It's not about discussing facts or reality, but about certain people pushing their unchangeable opinion that a mentor program is a bad idea. I myself have been calling this out several times in the past because I find it just annoying to read. So no, to me it's not like wanting to suppress discussion, but to prevent this hate campaign.

[Love Zhaoying]

The entire "mentors" discussion is off-topic from the Original Post in this thread. 

[xDancingStarx]

21 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

The entire "mentors" discussion is off-topic from the Original Post in this thread. 

I quote from the original post: "Some people are so lost that they never make it out of the landing circle."

Of course this already implies that there are no mentors helping the "lost" people. It's not a coincidence that few posts later someone provokingly asks if the mentor program is still running. So no, mentors were already part of the original post (wrongfully IMO since the title suggested that the thread would be about the Community Exhibition)

Edited February 22 by xDancingStarx

[Prokofy Neva]

23 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

Since the very first mentioning of the new mentor program there have been people who right out *hated* the fact that there would be new mentors, some characterizing potential new mentors as power hungry selfish people, a program that is deemed to fail. I'm not a mentor so I feel completely free to speak about this. And you could see these posts since the very first thread. It's not about discussing facts or reality, but about certain people pushing their unchangeable opinion that a mentor program is a bad idea. I myself have been calling this out several times in the past because I find it just annoying to read. So no, to me it's not like wanting to suppress discussion, but to prevent this hate campaign.

I would suggest the following for you:

o Go to this particular Exhibition hub and spend perhaps 15-20 minutes in the morning -- come back again in the evening.

o Go to some of the other Bellisseria and Mainland welcome areas, but focus on the ones with mentors, which are the newer ones

o Do this about 10 times or even 20

Then come back here and see if you will still spout the same opinion. That's all. Go and visit these places, put in the time, observe, take notes, come back. That's what some of us here have done. Have you? If not, go and do so.

The mentors are IN the new welcome  hub so of course it's related.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 2/19/2024 at 2:34 PM, animats said:

That's how it's done.

A few times, I've helped a new user get started. It takes about an hour. Answer their questions. Find out what they're into. Take them two or three places, from scenic mountains to a gun range to a cyberpunk sim, depending on their interests. Talk them through rezzing their first cube in a sandbox and put a texture on it. Rez some good stuff from inventory to show what's possible. Explain that this is a huge shared world, that almost everything was built by the residents, that there is private land ownership and control, and that Linden Lab acts like a municipal government, not a game master.

One new user was a gamer. So I took him to a combat sim, and we got visitor tags in the lobby. Once inside, we got out of the way of the machine gun fire and watched for a while. He'd found something he understood, and went off to arm up and read all the roleplay rules for the sim.

Another was trying to build in the WelcomeHub sandbox. I took them to Builder's Brewery and built some simple things from prims, and we watched some good builders at work. They looked at the class schedule and planned to come back for a beginning building class.

That's what it takes. But it's tough to automate that.

 

It's not just tough, although not impossible, to automate with only like a chatGPT.

It also doesn't scale if hand-tooled like this.

Hence the entire thing we're reading here.

 

[Rowan Amore]

Patience is often more important than anything else when dealing with new residents.  

A scenario I've seen quite often at the Hub...

New person walks up to a.mentor and ask a question.  Mentor replies.  Before the mentor gets out a complete sentence, the new person wanders off.  They come back and ask another question.  The mentor replies and yep, you guessed it.  The new person wanders off without listening to.the reply.

There is NO fix for this problem.  

[Scylla Rhiadra]

5 hours ago, Porky Gorky said:

Who are these mole people? Are they forum mods or something more special? Someone please catch me up on the mole people origin story, thanks!

They're like lizard people, except nice and not trying to overturn human civilization.

We think. 🤔

Edited February 23 by Scylla Rhiadra
Typo

[Charlemagne Allen]

Be nice to the.Moles. They actually log in and do stuff inworld.

[Midnoot]

3 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

Patience is often more important than anything else when dealing with new residents.  

A scenario I've seen quite often at the Hub...

New person walks up to a.mentor and ask a question.  Mentor replies.  Before the mentor gets out a complete sentence, the new person wanders off.  They come back and ask another question.  The mentor replies and yep, you guessed it.  The new person wanders off without listening to.the reply.

There is NO fix for this problem.  

Get near them and post your answer again . I've seen it 100 times . I've followed newbies to ensure the message is posted while they're within range . No need to act like a statue who can't walk a few meters .

[Charlemagne Allen]

1 minute ago, Midnoot said:

Get near them and post your answer again . I've seen it 100 times . I've followed newbies to ensure the message is posted while they're within range . No need to act like a statue who can't walk a few meters .

I don’t see that all. If anything, no one asks questions at all or just wanders around without saying much.