"What gets asked on Live Help?"

Posted on: May 20, 2006

Even if you've only been in the wonderful world of Second Life for a little while, you're prolly familiar—or at least have heard of—Live Help. Accessed from the Help menu (suitably enough), the now-familiar starting line, like a beloved soap opera's intro, goes like this:

 
Welcome to Live Help, where volunteers help their fellow residents with questions about Second Life.  Please enter your question to begin, and then allow a few moments for available helpers to respond.  Please do not close your Live Help window until you are finished.  If your question is not answered, please try again later or check www.secondlife.com/support. Please note, unless the person responding has the last name Linden, LIVE HELPERS ARE NOT LINDEN STAFF MEMBERS, and answers should be considered unofficial.
 


Community makes the difference, and you can learn more about Second Life's volunteer programmes, including Live Help, here. For greater context, I'd highly recommend reading Jeska Linden's recent post on Robin Linden's blog, titled "Volunteers Working Together".

What this all has to do with what I'm going to say is, I started having dreams telling me to look for the "LHHW". Decoded, that stands for "Live Help Heavy Water". This acronym initially made not much sense to me, until I thought of… nuclear reactor. Live Help is really a human powerplant: it gives off a glow, and there's no shortage of reactions.

The following is a randomized sampling of around 1000 LH sessions from around the clock during May 8-13, 2006. They're all from the Main Grid; I wonder how Teen Grid might differ? Topics were organized more granularly as more questions came up. It could have used a larger number of samples to be more statistically significant, but this will hopefully provide some insight and amusement into the breakdown of the kinds of things that are asked on Live Help.

I've already shared this internally but wanted to post it here because it'll save "chronocuriosity"—inquiries which anyone can look up but take serious time. So whether you're a Live Helper, have been Live Helped, or just want to have a look at a spreadsheet in watermelon colors:
 

(click for larger)


 
Observations:

  • I'm surprised "How do I make money?" and "How do I get a job?" didn't come up more.
     
  • Streaming media comes up a lot. Residents often do not know that SL just passes it through, and what's most confusing is there aren't helpful error messages when an URL is broken. :(
     
  • A relatively common misconception exists that if a Resi uninstalls SL, they'll lose their avatar and inventory.
     
  • One of the most common building questions is "How do I link objects?"
     
  • "How do I stop dancing?" has been a popular question for ages. What about an easy "Stop Animations" button, similar to "Stand Up" or "Release Keys".
     
  • Also frequent is "How do I take a demo skin/other body part off?" It isn't readily apparent that body parts must be *swapped*, not *removed* (as clothing is).
     
  • Related to that is "I changed my av, how do I get back to my old one?" Would be nice to have a history or undo button for this.
     
  • There continues to be a lot of confusion over how proceeds from sold group land are distributed.

Please note that some Residents came on LH to ask more than a single question; each one they asked counts. As expected, it's a well-rounded mixture of topics.

What conclusions do you draw from this?

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