Hello members, moderators and guests, I would like to welcome you all to the official LiveWire newsletter!
In here you can find important updates about the site. You will find inspirational stories form your peers. You will see things through the eyes of other members. You can hear likes and dislikes of fellow members. And most importantly, you will have a good time reading this!
Each week we will have some sort of game, in which the winner will get 25 points from me personally. This week is a word game. I will give you two words, and you have to see how many different words you can find by mixing and matching the letters. The words are, "Support Leader." All words must be at least 4 characters. Post your words here, and who ever finds the most by 24 hours from now will get 25 points!
From the eyes of a support leader – 25th June 2007
By: Periwinkle
Subject: What belongs in ehelp?
Every support leader knows that ehelps come in very frequently and deal with a great variety of issues. Blinking in my inbox now are people wanting help with contraception and sex, people whose friends won’t listen to them, people struggling with self harm, people whose families seem to be falling apart around them. Almost every teen issue has a home in livewire’s ehelp system.
And at the top of each ehelp: a little red button marked ‘vote to delete’.
I, personally, rarely click that button. Some support leaders click it several times a day. Others have possibly never clicked it in their lives – but should they? What really belongs in livewire’s ehelp system?
By definition, it’s ‘emergency help’. Help for emergencies. No, not the kind of emergency you call the fire brigade for – we can’t do much about that. No, ehelp is for emotional emergencies. Those times when you need serious help, fast.
So let’s pretend we only allow true emergencies into ehelp…oh, hang on. How do we define an emergency? Is ‘am I pregnant’ an emergency? It might be for the person posting; we don’t know.
What about people with long, complicated situations who haven’t received the attention they deserve in the forums or don’t want to post there, for fear or flaming or for the increased anonymity the ehelp system offers? Are they emergencies?
Looking at that, it’s pretty clear that the ehelp system isn’t just for emergencies. It’s for people who don’t want anyone to know who they are, people who aren’t being listened to anywhere else and also people who, for whatever reason, aren’t members of livewire but seek help here.
The topic of what really belongs in ehelp has been widely discussed recently in the SL forum. DoomMaker is one of the more prominent members who are in favour of deleting ehelps with less information or which are not as serious, which he made clear in his topic ‘No votes to delete’. ‘They're rarely urgent, as displayed by the post content. It's usually just a failure to understand the site,’ he says.
The Professional disagrees: ‘I like to just say to myself, "While this may not be a big deal to me, it probably is to them.”… I'm not willing to vote to delete simply because of shortness/coherency.’.
Many SLs are clearly not in favour of definitive guidelines over what belongs in ehelp, but without them, there’s no clear answer to the question.
What do I recommend you do? Just think about what you put in ehelp. There’s always the forums as well. Ehelp, at least for the moment, is for everyone, but use it with consideration. If you have a minor issue, perhaps try posting in the forums first – you’re likely to get a much more varied response. However, if you feel like your problem merits a flash in the sidebar of every support leader and the detailed help that you will receive, don’t let anything stop you. We’re here to help, whether your request is flashing in the top of the sidebar or the bottom.
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This issue may seem a bit thin. But it is only the first one. So please, everyone, help out! Send in your stories, send in your opinions on features, send in reviews on the site. Anything that you think people will want to read, send it in! We have, as I type this 110,190 members, making us the largest teen support forum on the internet. And out of all of you, some are bound to have stories. Some of you have something that others will want to read. So send in your ideas, and see if your name will show up on here next time.
Peace,
Hadley Sheffield.
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