The following notes are taken from the Web User Group meeting held on Wednesday, September 26th, 2018.
These meetings are generally held monthly on a Wednesday at 14:00 SLT, and are chaired by Alexa and Grumpity Linden at Alexa’s barn. The focus is the Lab’s web properties, which include the Second Life website (including the blogs, Destination Guide, Maps, Search, the Knowledge base, etc.), Place Pages, Landing Pages (and join flow for sign-ups), the Marketplace, and so on and the Lab’s own website at lindenlab.com.
Marketplace
New Deployment – New Features
A deployment to the SL Marketplace was made on Wednesday, September 26th. However, due to some issues surfacing, it had to be rolled back, causing the grid status report of Marketplace Maintenance.
This is actually the update that includes more of the promises Marketplace updates, including:
- Wish lists.
- Follow favourite merchants.
- A new drop-down of people a user must frequently sends Marketplace gifts to.
It will now be re-scheduled for deployment once the issues have been fixed.
Clean-up
The Lab will shortly be starting a clean-up of the Marketplace. This will most likely be done by running different queries with different criteria, and seeing what the results would be in terms of removed listings / stores.
For example, one query might be run against all users who have not logged-in to Second Life or the Marketplace in (say) 10 years or 6 years, and see how many items might be unlisted as a result. If the outcome is thought to be a manageable amount (i.e. not half the Marketplace potentially vanishing), then the query might be run, and the items unlisted. Then the process will be repeated over a shorter time period (e.g. say not logged in for 8 years of 4 years, depending on the original query). Other criteria, such as number of sales of an item over a number of years, or how frequently an item is flagged etc., might also be added to the mix over time.
This does mean that items that still work in SL, but the creator is no longer active in SL or the Marketplace, will likely vanish. However, as items are only being unlisted, and affected merchants will be contacted and advised where possible. So, they will always have the option to log-in to the Marketplace and re-list their items if they so wish.
Web Updates Release Notes
It is hoped that a location will be established for web property release notes, just as there are pages for release notes on SL wiki.
Automatic Landmark Updating
This is an age-old problem: how to automatically update store (or other) landmarks following a move. In 2012, Toysoldier Thor came up with the concept of the Virtual Landmark (VLM) – see here for the essentials – and which eventually lead to Darrius Gothly developing VLM for Virtual Worlds – see here for the essentials. VLMFVW are not ideal (I have not tested them in five years to confirm whether they still work), but at the time they did assist with the problem.
Unfortunately, having landmarks that can be remotely updated is seen by the Lab as requiring an entire new landmark system and (presumably) and entirely new asset type which would exist entirely independently of existing LMs (and so could cause confusion among users), so this is not something that is likely to happen in the short-to-medium term, if at all.
Date of Next Meeting
Wednesday, October 24th, 2018.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
I wonder if the Auctions page ever comes up in this user group, or if that’s Concierge & Land. Unless there have been updates I’ve missed, the project seems a little stuck.
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Auctions does come up at WUG meetings – just not at this one. The project has been slowed down due to issues – per Ebbe’s September Town Hall – but the user-to-user auctions are due to be deployed “soon”. If nothing has appeared by October’s meeting (and assuming I don’t forget the date!) I’ll ask there, if you’re unable to attend 🙂 .
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