[Linda Buquet]

Hi guys,

It's a great idea and thanks for volunteering to help.

We've had other members suggest this and I even mentioned to Larry recently that it would be cool if we could set up some type of mentoring program. But there are a few issues. These are the ones that come to mind right away but I think there were some other concerns.

1) Confidentiality - If we suggest and teach one newbie a niche, anyone reading can decide to steal the ideas we give that one person and then we have several competing in that niche all doing the same things we recommended to the one person. A lurker that isn't very high integrity could horn in on it too.

2) Newbie follow-through. As we know some newbies do not have the skillset or commitment to follow through on the suggestions you guys would take your valuable time to suggest. We've had this happen in private with members who seemed well intentioned, kept asking and asking for help. Then we give it and they just don't do anything with it or worse just disappear.

That makes the whole experiment or project looked like it failed when in reality the niche may have been good, the member support and ideas were good, the newbie just didn't have what it took or didn't even try.

3) Mentor follow up - people get busy, someone could start helping with best intentions then just stop or take 3 days to show up and answer a question. Or a member who's a newbie but thinks he's a pro starts giving advice that is not very good or outright bad. Then it just gets frustrating and can sort of look bad for the forum.

This isn't anything against anyone here, in fact I think you two would be especially good at this. In an ideal world, because I love helping people I'd like to do something like this, but unfortunately it's NOT an ideal world. You guys have no idea about some of the things that happen. We've just had lots of situations come up that got dicey but luckily most were behind closed doors in PMs and not an open book on the public forum.

I used to wear rose colored glasses and try to help people more and I hate to sound jaded or negative, but just have been through too many things.

So those are a couple thoughts. I think I had a whole list of issues when this has come up before, I just can't remember everything right now. Larry may have more to add.

I'm open to ideas. Just not sure I have the time or emotional bandwidth right now. I have been going through some really serious family health issues and most days it's all I can do to just show up, to tell you the truth.