Day: November 2, 2023

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday November 1st, 2023. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript.

No video this time, Pantera was unavailable, and the meeting was exclusively text chat.

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.
• 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.

Updates Since the Last Meeting

• Linden Homes Store:
  • There has been a high degree of feedback on the Linden Homes store since its launch (see: Looking at the New Linden Homes Store).
  • As a result of this, improvements and updates are being made to the store, and feedback is continuing to be reviewed.
• Marketplace:
  • The Marketplace team have been looking into the case of some merchants changing their store name to include 5 stars to seem like their store rating is 5 stars. This is an ongoing investigation, but preliminary results indicate it is a small percentage of merchants, and a course of action has yet to be determined.
  • Marketplace search relevance is again being worked upon, primarily in response to feedback received, and updates will be forthcoming once they are ready.

Caspervend and the Marketplace

• In September 2022, Linden Lab acquired CasperTech (see the official blog post and my own article, which includes a Lab Gab interview with Casper Warden for more), a family which includes the popular Caspervend system.
• This meeting saw questions taken on how merchants use Caspervend, and capabilities within Caspervend they’d like to see incorporated in the MP. This drew a breadth of feedback including:
  • Caspervend’s use of graphs to present data relating to sales, deliveries, etc., being carried over to the MP and broadened.
  • A general expansion of MP stats (e.g. top selling products and sales over time).
  • Integration of Caspervend’s in-world selling tools with the MP to allow items viewed on Caspervend sales kiosks to be delivered via the MP.
• This discussion broadened into more general requests for capabilities related to both Caspervend and the Marketplace both together and individually. These included:
  • Having items purchased via the MP or via dedicated Caspervend in-world servers (and other third-party vending solutions?) to be delivered to a folder within Inventory called “Purchased Items”, rather than “Received Items” or “Objects” – as *everything* users receive might be regarded as a “received item”.
  • Having the means to report broken links within MP so they might be fixed (e.g. by a store owner where the links in their MP listings refer to the former location of any in-world store they own, as they’ve forgotten to update following a move).

Dynamic Landmarks

• Part of the discussion on Caspervend / the Marketplace raised the matter of dynamic landmarks.
• This is a subject raised numerous times in the past – most notably by Toysoldier Thor under the term Virtual Landmarks (VLM), see:
  • Feature request SVC-8082 “Proposed Global Service for SL: VIRTUAL LANDMARKS & VLM Mapping Services”
  • The Virtual Landmarks forum thread.
  • My own article on the VLM concept.
  • The third-party attempt to address VLMs, developed by Darius Gothly (but now discontinued – illustrating the need for centralised support of such a system by LL).
• The general idea for “dynamic landmarks” was referenced by Sytax Linden as a good idea, and the above points are being passed to him for reference (assuming they might be of interest).

In Brief

• Holding the Web User Group more frequently is still being looked into.
• Requests were made for the following:
  • Make the *entire* Destination Guide (+ things like the SL public calendar) directly viewable through the viewer(!).
  • Support for 360 snapshots within the Destination Guide.
  • Utilising different colours  counts on DG entries to denote scripted agents rather than active avatars.
  • Expanding parcel Search categories to match those in the Destination Guide in order to make public parcels more discoverable.
  • A public-facing document outlining what is being worked on, what feedback has been taken on-board, etc.,  so people are more generally aware of what is happening with web properties + updates.
  • More Search categories / filtering (web / viewer search) – e.g. “clothing”, “landscaping”, “Building”, etc.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, December 6th, 2023.