Pokefarm Mentors; Discussion 'Ideas'

Maybe I phrased it badly, I meant we need to find a way to reach out to the people too shy to PM someone at random and I don't think a userbar is the answer.

Then the wiki is the answare right? What we could do is refering to the wiki and the most asked qestions in the help forum in the mentor threath so people who are to shy to ask can go there? We could also make a x and y qestion have been asked a lot let's put theme in the Q&A on the mentoor forum? Then shy people have a other place to look at. We could also reference to the guide forums on the same front page? Are those meaby idea's?

So a visible indicator for the mentors who are willing to also answer to random questions or a Q&A post and wikilinks? Question, why not have both? It is true that some people are too shy to PM someone just randomly, but I think it is quite possible that for some of them the reason is that they are afraid they'll be ignored. I, too, have gotten some of those random questions, and without an exception, all of them have started with something like 'I'm sorry to bother you', 'I understand if this is stupid and you don't want to answer', one even said 'please, don't get mad at me'. I think, for some of those people it would be helpful if there was some clear indicator saying "Hey, ask away. It's what I signed up for." Of course, some people are just too shy for PMs altogether, and for them, wikilinks and a nice collection of answers for usually occuring questions would be more than helpful. Also, if the mentor discord becomes a thing, keeping the Q&A up to date should be rather easy, when mentors can just slap the questions there, so whoever is responsible for updating the list can pick them up from there. My question is, do these two neccessarily cancel each other out?

I don't think so. There are people who are just really shy to send a pm even when they know the persone won't be bothered or even like to help. Some people really rather have a Q&A then having to go through all the stress to send a singel pm to somone even when they know the persone wants to help. I think both a Q&A and a mentor list would help the most people c:.

Bumping this up; anymore ideas folks? Honestly what we're stuck on right now is trying to figure out how people should be paired together.

These are just a couple solutions I have: *Have mentors have "specialties" Basically, mentors could be paired up with anyone, but mentors have certain specialties (e.g. hunts, site basics, etc etc) to offer. Downsides to this: some mentors may not want a mentee that doesn't need help with their specialty, or (Arceus forbid) ignore questions not geared towards their specialty. *Assignment "at random" Well...maybe not completely at random. Mentors are assigned numbers (maybe based off join order?) as are mentees. Then a random number of mentor is picked, and paired up with a random mentee number. Mentors and mentees are removed from the list after getting paired up. Downsides to this: Some mentors may want certain users or more than one mentee. Also mentors or mentees may disappear without notice, so they might need to be added back to the list. *Let mentors choose This method lets mentors pick their mentees from the list of available ones. This allows someone to pick, say, a friend of theirs who just joined, or someone with a similar play style. Downsides to this: more of a free-for-all style, and may prevent some mentors from getting mentees based off availability.

The let the mentor chose did end up with a free for all in my experience and lots of mentees didnt really get a mentor they needed or matched up with time zone ^^; Perhaps there could be a questionaire type thing? Asking about time zones/ areas of help (needed or wanted) and match based on compatibility from the questionaire? Not sure how well itd work in practice

I would keep the timezone in mind while parring up mentors and mentees c:. For the rest Mentores could say what things they are good at: tournements, hunting, massa clicking etc. If mentoors or mentees or even both say they want a specifik mentoor mentee then assign the mentor to the mentee (or other way around) they want. Otherwhise I would say random genorater whil keeping in mind the timezone c:.

I like both things, so modifying my second idea (the "at random" idea): Maybe different lists for different timezones and the numbers inside each list are the same