March 2026 SL Web User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday March 4th 2026. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article, my thanks to her for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Web User Group exists to provide an opportunity for discussion on Second Life web properties and their related functionalities / features. This includes, but is not limited to: the Marketplace, pages surfaced through the secondlife.com dashboard; the available portals (land, support, etc), and the forums.
  • As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
    • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
    • In both Voice and text.
    • At this location.
  • Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Friday February 27th Marketplace Outage

On Friday, February 27th, 2026, the Marketplace suffered an outage resulting in delays to item deliveries, background check-outs and viewer notifications for approximately 5 hours. This was apparently caused by a degradation in the MP asynchronous workers during a deployment, resulting in a backlog in the MP queuing system. The backlog should be clear now, and there have been no recent reports of missing / delayed items or notifications.

Updates

  • Changes are being made to the email verification prompt that comes up on the Second Life dashboard – those who have verified their email won’t see anything (“for a while”). Those who haven’t verified their email address for contact are advised to do so.
  • Updates to the web maps to allow searching by region name is still “slotted” for implementation.
  • Updates are in progress for the buying land experience – the look and presentation of the pages, UI changes, etc. – not changes to current land pricing.
  • The viewer splash screen will be changing soon as a part of the viewer UI / font changes contained in the upcoming 2026.02 viewer.
  • Work on making the Marketplace home page more responsive on Mobile devices is continuing, with small changes already made to the sidebar.
  • Quality of Life / Internal updates:
    • Further guardrails have been placed around Marketplace Product Listing Enhancements (PLEs) to prevent users being double-charged.
    • Multiple bug fixes related to wishlist displays, language selections and display name synchronisation, and similar.
    • Upgrades are being made to some web-related AWS services.

Marketplace

  • Th question was asked if people felt it would be worth a break of 12-18 months on work on all Marketplace development (bug fixing, etc., still continuing), in order to get variants / styles (e.g. multiple colour options, etc.,) in a single listing produced and released.
    • Whilst stated that a “year / year-and-a-half” was “very conservative”, it was still something of a surprised given that in late 2022, Reed Linden stated variants would be the “first deployment” in 2023.
    • Spidey Linden noted that the biggest hurdle with the project is actually migrating users as smoothly as possible from having multiple listings for the same item (but in different colours) to having all options in the one listing.
    • There was support for the idea and variants  / styles is something that has long been promised and has been a popular request.
  • The above spun-out into a discussion on “Marketplace 2.0”.
    • Currently there are no plans for a “Marketplace 2.0”, so this was more a “throw out ideas” session.
    • This discussion also spun out into requests for “social” elements to be included on MP listing, such as a indicator as to when a store owner last logged-in to SL, the date any item was posts to the MP (already available via some 3rd party browser plug-ins, support Firefox, Edge and Chrome and its variants – I use it with both Brave and Gener8).
  • An alterative question regarded on “Marketplace 2.0”, were it to be developed, is whether merchants would access not having any migration mechanism and having to go through and manually re-list all their items on the new version.
    • This caused something of a divided response, with some seeing it as not being a problem for MP stores with large inventories, as it was argued (not unreasonably in the case of clothing), that the reason for many stores having large numbers of listings is because they have multiple colour version of each item, each with it own listing – which any new Marketplace would solve by allowing multiple variants in a single listing.
    • Others felt any requirement to manually upload to a new MP would slow adoption.
    • Still others felt that having a new MP with “more features” would still be worth the effort to give them a new, cleaner & more functional store.
  • It was suggested that some of the pain in moving to a “new” MP could be eased by offering an extended transition period to allow creators to gradually make the move.
    • However, it was pointed out that running two systems side-by-side will incur additional cost and so a) would have to be factored-in to the transition period; b) would likely preclude both the current MP and “MP 2.0” running side-by-side indefinitely; sooner or later merchants would have to move.
    • There is also the risk of consumer confusion over where to find items if the transition period is drawn out to the point where creators migrate their listings in small quantities (“one or two a week” was mentioned), which could then impact sales.
  • Calls were made to simply delete stores from the Marketplace on the basis of the creator not logging-in to SL for a given continuous period (currently, listings are made “inactive” if the owner has not logged-in during a certain period). This is a potentially damaging approach, as it could unfairly penalise users who are forced into a more restricted ability to log-in to SL due to social circumstance, illness, etc.
  • The discussion on “MP 2.0” spun out to include integration of CasperVend and the ability to see through the MP and via in-world vendor kiosks.
  • A request was make to solve the “translation issue” whereby automatic translation of products leads to things like the wrong colour being delivered (e.g. a translation referencing the “pink” item for delivery, whereas the listing shows the “red” version.

Other Items

  • Community Pages / Forums Changes:
    • Concerns were raised over recent changes to the Community pages (e.g. the official blogs) / Forums — notably around logging-in.
    • These concerns took two parts:
      1. The fact that the logging-in process has been changed by the third party providing the community pages / Forum platform (Invision) to use OAuth as their authentication method, rather than the Lab’s own MFA;
      2. There was no announcement of the change by Linden Lab via blog or Forum post, in advance of it being made by Invision across their services.
    • The concern over the use of cookies seems to be (in part) born of misunderstanding: cookies are a “standard” means of maintaining login session IDs. However OAuth appears to be retaining the cookie after a user has physically logged-out from the Community pages via the sign-out option (which does not mean logging-out of SL), which appears to be the problem.
    • Kermit Linden offered to look into the authorisation flow.
Invision has implemented a new verification process outside of the lab’s MFA (which not everyone uses) for accessing the Community pages (official blogs, the forums, etc.), they host on LL’s behalf. The process was introduced without any communication from LL, and utilises cookies, which has raised concerns.
  • The issue of  SL wiki thumbnail images not displaying has been partially resolved, but more work is required to completely resolve it.
  • A request was made to add a further SL Discord generic category for those whose blogs fall outside the current three categories of  fashion, home & garden and bloggers-streamers.
  • Complaints that 2 clicks to reach a person’s transaction history on the SL dashboard, and Marketplace is too hard and the labelling is not precise (which is fair).
  • A general discussion on web search and its perceived drawbacks (such as being unable to exclude display Names from People searches, thus leading to “false positives” when seeking user names etc.)..
  • A discussion on being able to “register” brand names with LL to prevent things like copycat stores using the same name, or having stores using the sane name / word in their keywords coming ahead of registered stores in MP searches.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, April 1st, 2026.

A trip to Planet M’s Tula in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Planet M – Tula, March 2026 – click any image for full size

As I work to catch up on a backlog of invitations, I pulled up one from Myrdin Sommer, inviting me to visit his Full region build of Planet M – Tula.

The invite actually came in mid-February with a note that it would likely only be around “for a few more weeks”. This being the case, my apologies to Myrdin for not having been able to visit sooner, and my hopes that this article finds its way to readers with sufficient time for them to visit the build before it vanishes.

Planet M – Tula, March 2026
Planet M’s Tula is a surreal red-earth valley shaped by organic forms, roaming animals, and a ceramic studio at its heart. Tula invites visitors to wander, pause, and look — offering a calm, dreamlike environment with Room to Dream, and perhaps make a picture or two. Tula welcomes you with open arms.

– A description of Planet M – Tula

As might be gleaned from the description above, this is a strange, alien environment – albeit with many touches of Earthly familiarity. The undulating landscape is marked by strange tubular-like extrusions and rising tendrils of clay ground, some of which are bent and bulb-headed, almost as if they are organic in nature whilst others end in lightbulb forms that provide local illumination together with some of the horizonal tubulars extending outwards from hillsides. In addition, flat-topped, mushroom-like islands rise on stout stalks to provide raised platforms, and honeycombed humps provide another form of illumination for their surroundings.

Planet M – Tula, March 2026

Amidst all of this water flows and pools and animals from Earth graze and roam: horses, cows, elephants, cats, birds, goats – even a couple of sauropods. Some of these can be found on the ground, others keep themselves to the island-like  tops of the “mushroom” islands.

Also waiting to be found are signs of human habitation. These are located in several of the caves found below the hills (and one of which sits behind a curtain, so to speak!). These are both primitive in form let cosy in nature, with human seating, furniture and so on. One of these is also the home to an artist’s studio.

Planet M – Tula, March 2026

The Landing Point sits towards the middle of the region, watched over by flamingos, a nearby signpost pointing the way to various attractions. These include the Octopit (find out for yourself!), and a memorial to director David Lynch. Note that the Landing Point is on a small island of its own, but the waters surrounding it are shallow enough to wade through.

Getting around the ground level is easy enough. However, exploring the “floating” islands without resorting to flying up to them is a matter of finding the rope ladder to the first and then using the interconnecting bridges and rope ladders to work your way around the rest.  Exploration of these will also allow you a view of  a group of dogs happily gathered on a white cloud complete with its own waterfall and a rope ladder to climb up to it.

Planet M – Tula, March 2026

With Earthly trees, grasses and lily pads making up the majority of the setting’s flora, Planet M – Tula is, as its description states, a surreal place, complete with a Moon floating just off the ground between two horns of rock, and a series of tiny floating “suns” to add to the illumination. It is also engaging in design and discovering all there is to see does cause you to travel its length and breadth, while the habitation spaces in the caves present places to rest awhile.

In all, an interesting visit with a fair amount to see and do. My apologies again to Myrdin for taking a while to make a visit.

Planet M – Tula, March 2026

SLurl Details

The art of Janine Portal in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery, March 2026: Janine Portal

In February, I received an invite from Astella Warrigal to visit her gallery, A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery. It was actually to attend the venue’s grand reopening, which was held on February 22nd, 2026. However, things being what they were for me at the time, I was unfortunately unable to attend that event; but I certainly wanted to make sure I got to see the exhibition of art by Janine Portal which formed a part of the re-opening.

I first encountered Janine’s work back in 2018, an immediately found it captivating. As I noted at that time:

Utilising animations and prims to present remarkable collage pieces with a surrealist edge that are quite captivating to see … some of the most unusual art and effects I’ve seen in Second Life for a while, each piece offering an unexpected view of what might otherwise appear to be and ordinary scene or photo or presenting a melding of ideas and / or narrative that is quite engaging.

– The artful collages of Janine Portal in Second Life

A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery, March 2026: Janine Portal

This is very much the case with the exhibition of Janine’s work at A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery, where it can be seen on the upper levels of the building. On display are some 13 collage images, all of them comprising found and manipulated (by Janine) art and photographs, including reproductions of artwork by the likes of William Blake, Hilma af Klint, Richard Diebenkorn, and Second Life photographer Ajax Ogleby.

Janine says of her work:

I’ve been making art in Second Life using a technique that involves layering transparent prims to create works with shifting collage images. In RL, long before I made an account in SL, layered transparent paint to express similar ideas, using many of the symbols you see here. 

– Janine Portal

A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery, March 2026: Janine Portal

Janine goes on to note that her art reflects ideas which have woven their way into her thinking and approach to art ever since her time at art school: ideas of the metaphysical and personal symbols of transformation. This gives her work a layered set of interpretations; whether one views them purely as visually engaging works of art or seeks to find those metaphysical ideas.  In this, Janine adds her own view on the art:

On a conceptual level they represent, to me, the endlessly shifting nature of reality, the ways in which we move through time and space and the nature of growth, change, and transformation.   

– Janine Portal

A Thousand Words Coffeehouse and Gallery, March 2026: Janine Portal

A genuinely captivating exhibition, one definitely worth the time in visiting.

SLurl Details

2026 week #10: SUG meeting summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
A view of Isola Sirena, Second Life - the main island summit village
Isola Sirena, January 2026 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, March 3ed, 2026 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. These notes form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. They were taken from the video recording by Pantera, embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks to Pantera for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas is held every other Tuesday at 12:00 noon, SLT (holidays, etc., allowing), per the Second Life Public Calendar.
  • The “SUG Leviathan Hour” meetings are held on the Tuesdays which do not have a formal SUG meeting, and are chaired by Leviathan Linden. They are more brainstorming / general discussion sessions.
  • Meetings are held in text in-world, at this location.

Simulator Deployments

  • Not deployments are planned for the week, channels will be restarted.
  • It had been planned to slot the initial deployment of WebRTC  between the 2026.02  Kiwi update (currently grid-wide), and the next formal RC release 2026.03 Loganberry. However a last-minute issue was discovered, delaying WebRTC whilst it is fixed.
  • The release to follow Loganberry will be 2026.04 Key Lime).

WebRTC Deployment

  • As noted above, the WebRTC deployment has been delayed, primarily for a couple of reasons:
    • LL is addressing some server issues that resulted in very occasional ‘drop from voice’ problems.
    • The WebRTC team is also digesting feedback from the recent Firestorm Town Hall in which firestorm users who have not moved away from a version 6.x (pre-PBR) version of Firestorm to a PBR-enabled version.
  • It is hoped the delay will not be longer than a week or so, so as to allow it to commence in March, but an update on this will be made soon.

In Brief

  • Rider Linden has just finished a tricky bit of infrastructure work and is now focusing on some the simulator aspects of the SLua project, including changes for being able to select a default script. A side effect of that is the ability for a viewer to specify a template script on create without the tricky copy stuff that the viewer was doing for that.
  • Leviathan Linden:
    • Has just finished fixing the “can’t save avatar action remap” problem with game_control but has not pushed the changes to a viewer repo as he working to clean the code up and produce documentation.
    • He regards this particular work as useful as it has reminded him of what remains to be done for game-control. In particular, remapping of controller buttons is not yet enabled in the preferences UI, although there should be work to support that already done under the hood.
    • He has not made any progress on Henri Beauchamp’s idea for solving the “perpetually cloudy avatar problem” see previously SUG summaries). It is coded on the server,  but he hadn’t been able to test it.
    • His next project is to audit how some “reliable” UDP messages are sent between viewer and server. There is a possibility he can fix some of the login/teleport/region-crossing connection failures with some work there. One of the message pairs to be looked at are CompleteAgentMovement/AgentMovementComplete. Dropping these is the source of quite a few B&W screens every day.
  • Monty Linden has been:
    • Working on meta problems, such as identifying Voice issues.
    • Talking to Brad Linden about making it easier to include logs in reports generated in the viewer.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video below as well.

  • An extensive discussion on llSetAgentRot and how it works and how it and avatar rotation / camera rotation/movement might be improved.
  • A short discussion on text-to-speech and how favourable (or not) it might be, based off of this feature request.
    • It was noted that transcription – speech to text – is already being experimented with using WebRTC.
  • Regio  Crossings:
    • It is being reported that for the last week or so, region crossings – physical vehicle or teleport – have been getting worse.
    • In addition, it is being claimed that, after an extended period of time in a region, people are finding their avatars being “soft disconnected” from the simulators: they can still move around and communicate within the region, by any attempt to move out of it results in a complete disconnection – and allegedly a full disconnect can occur just by rezzing / deleting an object or changing outfits.
    • There have been no apparent changes to the simulator code that would account for a worsening of region crossings, and it’s not entirely clear how widespread the issues are.
    • However, Monty linden has requested logs from anyone encountering these issues.
    • This discussion took up the latter half of the meeting (and beyond the end of the meeting), mixed in part with the rotation discussion noted above,
  • A discussion on releasing SLua grid-wide without complete documentation, or waiting until a full set of documentation is ready for what is being released, and then updated as code updates are made.

Date of Next Meetings

  • Leviathan Linden: Tuesday, March 10th, 2026.
  • Formal SUG meeting: Tuesday, March 17th, 2026.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.

The beauty of London’s China Buddha Caves in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
China Buddha Caves, March 2026 – click any image for full size

Located within Gansu province in western China is the county city of Dunhaung. It sits on the old Silk Road, and forms a cultural and religious crossroads. Founded as a garrison town in 11 BCE, Dunhaung is perhaps now more famously known for its proximity to the Mogao Caves, a system of 500 temples, caves and grottoes some 25 kilometres south-east of the city.

Also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes or Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, the network represents, along with other cave systems in the area, some of the finest examples of Buddhist art spanning a period some 1,000 years, the earliest caves having been dug in around 366 CE, initially as places of rest, worship and meditation. However, as time passed, they became a place of pilgrimage, and further caves and grottoes were dug, with the system expanding through until the 13th century, before they were “lost” until the late 19th century.

China Buddha Caves, March 2026

I mention all of this because in his latest artistic installation, London Junker offers us a vision of the Mogao Caves and the beauty of their art, sculptures and design with his China Buddha Caves build- project was sponsored by SL Public Land Preserve and Ravenglass Rentals (La Montana Rosa) – to which he extended a personal invitation for me to visit.

Situated in the snowy uplands of south-western Sansara, the build is initially deceptive to the eye. The Landing Point sits at the head of a descending gorge through which water tumbles and falls towards the sea. A large Buddha sits behind the Landing Point, undoubtedly offering blessing to arrivals, whilst a single grotto with wall murals and three more figures of Buddha sits to one side.

China Buddha Caves, March 2026

A further Buddha can be seen lower down in the valley, together with a shrine and structures built with their backs towards the rising cliffs. A single path runs down the side of the gorge, passing over a long bridge and down stairs to reach a second bridge crossing the waters and provide access to the tall statue of Buddha and the shrine, whilst a second path rises to the lowermost of the structures build against the cliff, and which forms the entrance to the caves proper.

The art and carvings within the Mogao Caves is truly magnificent, and the site fortunately escaped the Buddhist persecutions ordered by Emperor Wuzong of Tang in the ninth century, continuing to be used through until the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century. However, it was during that era that new trade routes started to open, and the use of the Silk Road fell into decline – and with it, the use of the Mogao Caves as a place of pilgrimage. By the mid- 14th century, no new caves were being built, and the site was largely forgotten other than by locals.

China Buddha Caves, March 2026

It was not until the 19th century that the caves were re-discovered.  Interest in exploring the ancient Silk Road and uncovering its secrets was initially a goal of western explorers and historians, and this eventually led them to Dunhuang and the caves. However, it was at the start of the 20th century that the greatest work of rediscovery commenced, with the good intentions of one man in particular.

His name was Wang Yuanlu. A Chinese Taoist, he had appointed himself guardian of the caves, and in the early 1900s set about clearing the entrances to many which had become blocked over the centuries, as well to trying to renovate many of the damaged statutes.

China Buddha Caves, March 2026

Most particularly, Wang’s work led to the discovery of a vast trove of manuscripts in what had simply been called Cave 17, but which afterwards was referred to as the Library Cave. Some 1100 scrolls and 15,000 books were found in the cave, together with an estimated 50,000 texts on a range of subjects including philosophy, art, literature and medicine. This discovery brought the Mogao Caves to wider global attention, with a number of foreign expeditions to explore them being mounted – several of which simply carted off whatever they could.

Fortunately, London’s China Buddha Caves suffers none of this looting. Rising up through multiple levels, as is the case at Mogao, they instead offer a captivating interpretation of their physical world inspiration, presenting a rich mix of Buddhist art and history,  the walls bearing beautiful murals and paintings, the statuary magnificent in detail and finish. As you rises up through the caves (take your time in exploring, some of the rising tunnels are easy to miss!), you will come across an opening to a veranda located against the cliff and above the main entrance, reflecting a similar, almost pagoda-like structure found at Mogao.

China Buddha Caves, March 2026

Each level becomes more expressive and rich as one ascends, with the upper most and the landing and grotto leading up to it being particularly attention-holding. However, all of the levels capture the beauty and history to be found in the caves at Mogao, and perfectly reflect the beauty of the murals to be found in many of the caves there. In this, I would advise using a PBR viewer in order to fully appreciate this installation, or if you are still pre-PBR, that you enable ALM.

Presenting a glimpse of what is now a UNESCO World Heritage Centre (since 1988), London’s China Buddha Caves offer a superb means by which to catch a glimpse of what is a magnificent centre of Buddhist history and art in the physical world.

CChina Buddha Caves, March 2026

SLurl Details

2026 SL viewer release summaries week #9

Posted on by Inara Pey
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation

Updates from the week through to Sunday, March 1st, 2026

This summary is generally published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:

  • It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy.
  • This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
  • By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
  • Outside of the Official viewer, and as a rule, alpha / beta / nightly or release candidate viewer builds are not included; although on occasions, exceptions might be made.

Official LL Viewers

  • Default viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 – maintenance update with bug fixes and quality of life improvements – December 2.
    • Notable addition: new VHACD-based convex decomposition library for mesh uploads.
  • Second Life Release Candidate viewer 2026.01 – 26.1.0.22359044520 , February 25 – NEW
    • Legacy search; WebRTC improvements; QoL improvements.
  • Second Life Project Viewers:
    • Second Life Lua Editor Alpha viewer 26.1.0.21525310258, February 3.
    • Second Life Voice Moderation viewer 26.1.0.20139269477, December 12.
      • Introduces the ability to moderate spatial voice chat in regions configured to use webRTC voice.
    • Second Life One Click Install viewer 26.1.0.21295806042, January 26, 2026 – one-click viewer installation.

LL Viewer Resources

Third-party Viewers

V7-style

  • Black Dragon for Windows –  5.6.0 March 1 – release notes.

V1-style

  • Cool VL viewer Stable: 1.32.4.22, February 28 – release notes.

Mobile / Other Clients

  • No updates.

Additional TPV Resources

Related Links