I think it's a great idea. I don't think it has to be a moderator at all, let's keep that out of the way of the discussions for now. The SOW doesn't really even cover this, the SOW is made for people who already are fully aware of the rules and even basic strategies.

Really the biggest criteria is time commitment. You don't need to be in the top 10 to help someone figure out the site and the game to a level where they have fun and can start learning themselves, heck you don't need to be in the top 100.

Especially without extra effort of watching some youtube vids or reading some articles, this game can be very difficult, and if not difficult, harsh (in outcome and such) to new players. I think there's a decent learning curve of maybe not the rules but of strategy and tactics.

While people ARE allowed to log in to other peoples' accounts with permission, I think it's a violation of decency and rule 9 if you mentor someone so completely that you log in to view their press without letting others know, so I'd heavily suggest such thing took place in private games with disclaimers. I'd be happy to both help coordinate such games (not everyone need by mentored/double-headed, they just need to know that it's going on) and/or be a mentor for someone.

One question I can't answer and may be difficult to answer is "how to get very very new players to read the forum and/or ask for a mentor". Cold-PMing new accounts asking if they want a mentor is probably not the way to go! ;)

To clarify, logging onto other people's accounts is only encouraged as "sitting", i.e. when you're not normally available. It's not something you can do just because you want to under normal circumstances. Which is why to begin with it's probably best just to use PMs and Spectate, but I think there should be discussion about how to double-head games, which is something SOW TAs have been asking for as well.

Or you just respond nicely when people come on here asking questions and help them out so that in the future they are more likely to ask for help instead of feeling unwanted and leaving? Maybe you could even have it say someone on the site to go to the forums if you are new for help.

Espi, I think a culture of welcoming and a dedicated Mentor progamme are both great and not necessarily mutually exclusive.

When I was in Boston with you guys, I told you I think it's important to set up th two players per country again. It would be like mentoring.

Yes ssorenn, it's like I just said that except I didn't explicitly say you were (one of) the person who asked for it.

The better we can educate some of our members, that better the pool of players gets, the better quality games that will be played.

hear hear.

I would gladly offer my help, if anyone would want it. I get requests for explanations on how and why I do some things. I always try to answer to the best of my ability.

I actually think it would be better if the Mentor wasn't a Moderator; that way advice on what you can and can't do can be leavened a bit with some realistic guidance! The best time for offering a Mentor would be as part of the registration process - everyone has to register, but if they don't want one they don't get plagued with "Hi I'm Troy McClure, you may remember me from such self-help videos as 'How to Play Ludo' "

Double-header players are a head away from insanity (Cerberus!) and should be a variant, you may as well revive one of my variants, Vote! where each and every member is allocated to a country, players then submit moves for the country and those with the highest number of votes gets enacted! But I digress... (I'm taking tablets for it)... there has to be a senior or prime move-entering player.

if we got some actual new-player submissions to Where Did I Go Wrong Series™ that would help too.

IMHO I'm only concerned about mentoring and teaching. Variants can go and stay on Vdip.

+1^

One idea is to have the site auto-post a message in a new window advertising certain things like a welcome to the site message along with things like getting around the site, tournaments, and something like this mentoring.

Despite ATC's buckets of spare time, I'm trying to lean towards non-feature-inducing strategies ;)

But maybe including something in the registration email in the long term wouldn't be a bad idea.

I've been thinking about this too a lot. As I see it, the bottleneck would actually be the amount of people available who would be willing to act as mentor. Press and such would not really be a restriction as such, since you can copy paste everything in mail.

In terms of automation, it could be included as part of the signup process. This would require *some* work, but mostly a reworking of text, which is easier than code.

But perhaps I was mistaken on my analysis of the bottleneck of number of players. I sure hope so. If so, please sign your name below.

List of people willing to become mentors to new player(s):
- Chumbles
- Valis
- TheMinisterOfWar
- ....you?

I could handle couple; it shouldn't be a huge workload, provided each Noob gets a Mentor for only one game; after that you're on your own! I reckon ssoren's also stuck his neck out (I'd love to be an observer on those mails!) cf above "I would gladly offer my help, if anyone would want it"

List of people willing to become mentors to new player(s):
- Chumbles
- Valis
- TheMinisterOfWar
- ssoren
- ....you?

Thx Chumbles

I think ,like I thought with the SoW. People who would like a mentor should show some desire at being here and playing games, that a prerequisite amount of games finished on site should be mandatory

It would not be difficult for me to add something to the welcome email telling new members to email the mod email asking for a mentor on their first game. We'd need a pretty good pool of willing members though in order to do it.

JMO, don't you think, letting newbs play a game or two, then offering support(mentoring) for people who seem interested is better.

If only we could permanently refer to a forum thread that didn't lock up...
in its absence a modmail would probably be best rather than listing mentors.

@ssorenn: apologies, I missed that message.

@Valis: that's exactly what I was thinking about. The welcome mail that refers to one single thread, where you can sign up. Like jmo says, we need a good pool of players to offer that service though.

In case it wasn't clear, I was taking a barb at the fact the Current Forum Technologies™ will cause such a thread to lock up without constant bumps, and we already have quite a few constantly bumped threads. Until stickying technology or some other equivalent comes through, it would have to be a page over at tournaments.webdiplomacy.net or something a bit more hassely. Or a recommendation in the starter email such as "IF noob THEN email us / make a thread requesting a mentor". I doubt it'll inundate the forums and once a mentor grabs it the thread can be let to die.

sorry; I'm a fan of overcommunication sometimes.

Valis....forum technology will not be at that level until 1999. And Y2k is expected to destroy the internet so whats the point?

I've met y2k, he's a nice fellow, how dare you slander him like that?!

Maybe a better method would be to have the welcome email direct the individual to PM the "Newbie Coordinator" who would answer basic questions about the site and who could coordinate between student and mentor.

Using the forum for something like this probably isnt too effective since we dont have multille forum sections or stickys