Day: September 7, 2023

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday September 6th, 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 Updates

Since the August meeting:

• Best selling items ordering has been deployed. When used within a specific MP store, this orders 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.
  • Within a store on the MP, click on the Sort By drop-down and select Best Selling from near the bottom of the list of items.
• The Wishlist and Favourite Stores options on user’s Marketplace dashboards have been updated:
  • The Favourite Stores listing can now be set to list the displayed items for store in the list by Newest Listings, so the thumbnails displayed alongside each store will always be for the most recent releases by the store.
  • Wishlists have been updated so that items can be listed with the most recent at the top, proceeding down to those which have been on the list the longest (or vice-versa, if you prefer).
• Fixes:
  • The MP pagination function has been revised in an attempt to eliminate a range of bugs (e.g. some sort options refusing to paginate beyond a certain point, merchant’s listing views not paginating correctly, etc.
  • A function scoring bug which impacted relevance searches has been fixed, so non-relevant items should no longer be appearing in searches defined by a specific relevance.
  • A bug which slowed the loading of peoples Favourites lists has been addressed.
  • A hotfix was implemented toto address the issue of some MP pages generating 504 errors as the MP appeared to “go down” for around 60 seconds or so when in use.
• Further updates will be coming out in September, but these were presented as “keep yours eyes out for..”, rather than specifics.

Marketplace Variants / Styles

• Once again the subject of “variants”  (e.g. different colours of an item in a single listing) was raised. This has been a topic across around three meetings, and seems to entirely miss the point that LL had – according to comments made in meetings during 2022 – actually developed a project – called Styles to address this request to a point where by:
  • August 2022: the back-end work for Styles was said to be complete , and it was being lined-up for deployment.
  • November 2022 and December 2022, the project was being earmarked for deployment in “early 2023” as a result of the project to overhaul MP search to match Web search.
  • January 2023, the project was being “re-prioritised” following the project to overhaul MP Search, and has never since been mentioned.
• As circumstances (again) prevented me from raising the status of this project at the meeting, I have dropped a note to meeting chair Sntax Linden to enquire after this work, in the hopes of a possible update at the next meeting.

In Brief

Please refer to the video for more on these items, and other points raised in the meeting.

• There appears to be an issue where items from Marketplace stores which have closed are appearing in Search results (although when clicked on, they result in the Marketplace home page being displayed). This issue was consistent reproduced during the meeting for one brand, and will be investigated.
• A general discussion on the effectiveness of Wishlists compared to simply piling up items in the shopping cart for a sometimes / maybe later purchase.
• Repeated requests for the MP to allow broader search capabilities in terms of content age, e.g.
  • Defining a search in terms of excluding content first listed beyond a certain date, or including only content listed after a certain date, etc.
  • Automatically making older (and potentially more outdated as a result) content less relevant in search results – so they appear at the end of search returns, rather than scattered throughout.
  • Including an automated “Last Updated” field for listing, which displays the last time a creator updated the actual item associated with a listing (rather than just revising the listing itself) even though creators can, if they choose, include version nots in the item’s description.
  • Adding a “Date First Listed” field to item listings – seen within the meeting as the most popular request, followed by / along with the automated “Last Updated” field, and then the potential to make the options search filters (e.g. search by date range, 2023-2016).
• Aligned to, but separate from, the above, were requests for more involved inspection of items on the MP so they can be more completely (and automatically) determined in terms of being full or partial mesh, prim, or sculpty, etc., and then filters added to exclude the unwanted types (e.g. excluding any and all sculpties from a search).
• Requests for improved editing capabilities when creating listings – to change font size / colour / emphasis, hyperlinks, etc., and for an API so that lists could be created / updated via scripted means (with an option to undo changes / bulk updates).
• A request has been made to once again increase the frequency of the WUG meetings – possibly back to fortnightly, as was originally the case.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, October 4th, 2023.