Day: August 3, 2023

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday August 2nd, 2023. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording 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), 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.
• They 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.

Marketplace

Re-Indexing for Listings Issue

• An issue was discovered with MP product listings not showing up in search results or for store owners using their Manage Listing pages (although the product listing could be reached directly by entering its name).
• This was traced to the items failing to be indexed correctly by the Marketplace service.
• As a result, LL initiated a complete re-indexing of the MP at the start of week #31, and while it took time to complete, the issue should now be resolved and all product listing should be showing correctly via search, etc.
• Those still encountering issues with their products should raise a Jira.

General

• Best selling items ordering: when used within a specific MP store, this will in the near future order items according to how well they have been selling in comparison to the rest of the items in the store over the past 30 days, to better reflect current sales.
• “Do Not Show Limited Quantities” in Search:
  • There have been requests to either have this option (shown in product search results at the foot of the left-side column along with Demos) enabled by default or limited quantity items should not be shown in Search results.
  • This has been requested primarily due to the issue of (new) users buying ex-gacha items without realising that are not buying from the original creator.
  • Given there are legitimate reasons for Limited Quantity items to be listed on the MP, excluding them from Search would be potentially  discriminatory.
  • Preferable solutions suggested were:
    • Retain the option and either reverse it – so it has to be enabled to include limited quantity items OR have whichever way the toggle is set stored within the user’s MP cookies, rather than the check box having to be be set against every search.
    • Add a further checkbox to specifically eliminate (or include, depending on the default setting) Gacha items from / with Search results.
    • LL implement a new product category – Limited Quantity – specifically for such products / items – although how well this would work is open to question, given there is a Gacha category which does not prevent those types of limited quantity items pitching up in Search results.
• The above spread to a broader discussion on creators using unicode characters and punctuation symbols in their store names which actually makes it harder for them to show up in search results under the Merchants / Stores tab, unless a precise full or partial copy of their brand name is entered.
• Listing Enhancement metrics: a request was made for those paying for Listing Enhancements to receive metrics (e.g. no. of times displayed, number of click-throughs generated, number of sales from click-throughs).
• Product reviews:
  • A suggestion that LL should allow reviewers to just leave star ratings against items listed on the MP, as used to be the case with SL Exchange and is the case with Amazon.
  • A request for the MP to be open to reviews by those who have purchased a product in-world (and who may have used the MP as a form of catalogue to seek out items they then purchase in-world).
  • The ability to view an individual’s review history on the MP – allowing their fairness / bias to be better judged.
  • See also feature requests BUG-233138 “Social/Creator Focused Marketplace Feed” and BUG-233139 “A user-run first-line Moderation Tool”.
• General discussions on:
  • The use of Favourites List and Wishlist options (e.g. Favourites List – as a means of quickly pulling up preferred brands and checking for new releases, requests for multiple Wishlists, etc., making lists more easily shareable other than by direct URL, etc.).
  • Preferred general Search results ordering (e.g. newest first or best selling).

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, September 6th, 2023.