Tours - YOU are the Key to Retaining Newcomers

College has me busy busy these days, but in my downtime I've been able to read an excellent narrative by Urbane Chaos that detailed an encounter he had with a new user.  Unless you've been in some sort of cave or bomb-shelter, you've heard by now of the really great effort that Urbane Chaos and others have been putting into renovating AWTours; that effort has paid off as AWTours became the setting for U.C. and his tourist acquaintance, and the infrastructure for that tourist to become familiar with the Active Worlds technology as well as its community.

An informative location in the recently renovated AWTours world

By the end of the post we as readers had been challenged to "go the extra mile" for new tourists, many of whom may still be having difficulty achieving flight or leaving AWGate. The whole story was great and is the sort of hands-on experience that new users need to make any sort of word-of-mouth advertising successful.  It especially had me beaming by the end because this story read so much like a similar encounter I had a couple of years ago.  The circumstances were different -- I ended up spending an evening building with a tourist -- but the experience the same.  Read on, as we turn back the clock to the far-distant year... 2009.