Without a 24/7 presence of Greeters in-cavern, and with no schedule, that leaves those of us who encounter new and lost players in a bit of a bind. We'd like to be able to direct people in need of assistance to the Greeters 'Hood, but at the same time, we don't want to send people there without some sort of assurance that help will be there. Sending a new player off on a "wild goose chase" just doesn't seem like the fair or right thing to do.
Nev's original idea to address this was for Messengers to keep track of the active Greeters so we could tell which Greeters (if any) are online at a moment in time, and thereby know if it was safe to send someone over to the Greeters 'Hood or arrange some other meeting place. But, this idea created some challenges of its own...
- someone would have to keep up to date on who is and isn't an active member of the greeters and maintain a list
- all participating members would have to maintain tracking through their BUDDIES lists to match the master list
- it wasn't clear how well this idea would scale beyond the Messengers, to include other non-Greeters who wanted to be of some assistance
- there would be no distinction between 'online' and 'active', so we'd have to use PMs to ask Greeters to see if they were available
Who's On Duty
What if the NGs had some sort of widget that showed which greeters are online and on-duty?
- Greeters could "clock in" and "clock out" at the beginning and ending of duty time.
- Anyone else could go to a web page and see, at a glance, who is on duty at that moment and the KI #s.
I know this would create a tiny bit of extra work for the Greeters... you'd have to remember the clocking in, clocking out part. But maybe we could automate that to a point with a custom CWE build, too. I think there are some possibilities here, and I am curious for input from others.