December 2023 SL Web User Group (WUG) meeting summary

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday December 6th, 2023. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy, is embedded at the end of this summary – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

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 / or 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.

Marketplace

Supporting PBR Creations

Sntax Linden opened the meeting to idea as to how LL can support makers of PBR content via the Marketplace. Key feedback included:

• At least a clear category distinction for PBR-enabled items.
• More preferably the ability for creator to indicate whether their product is “classic Materials” (or some such – the technical term is “Blinn-Phong”, which is likely a confusing mouthful for most users) or “PBR-enabled”, in the same manner as they can note a product as “100% Mesh” or “Partial Mesh”.
• Some form of iconography on listing pages to indicate content (e.g. whether it is mesh (or partial mesh) and / or PBR enabled and / or rigged for wearing primary and secondary types; or whether it is “classic Materials (or some such), with/without baked lighting, etc.).
  • The problem here is that if the icons become too granular, they risk becoming confusing / off-putting when seen in listings and / or the simply confuse users unfamiliar with the MP, unless some form of cheat sheet / icon key is provided on every listing.
  • The above might be mitigated against if the icons are set with tooltip, so that when moused-over, the tip displays a brief description of the icon’s meaning.
• If icons were to be used, have them act as filters to help narrow / manage searches.
• Addition of specific search filter such as mesh+rigged+baked and lighting+PBR.
• Further filters in the left-side filter list to distinguish PBR components / kits (e.g. Building and Object components → PBR Materials).
• This broadened into a more general discussion on a greater use of distinguishing icons (with tooltips) within listings Marketplace in general.

Senra and Mesh Bodies

• The above also focused on the Senra avatars, and the need to distinguish creations for these so that new users using the Senra avatars can more easily find clothing and accessories to fit them.
• The above seems particularly pertinent given the “official 1.0” release of Senra made on Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 (the August release of the avatar now being referred to as a “beta” release), so there is potentially going to be an uptick in creator-provided content for Senra.
• This raised the question of a generic category and filters for mesh body types for easier product location (e.g. Human, Animals, Monsters, Fantasy, etc.) – although this could be subject to confusion when listing / trying to find things like anthropomorphic mesh characters.
• Garfield Linden suggested an open-ended tagging system for mesh body support: creators could freely input the supported mesh body as a tag, selecting from a drop-down that shows how many other products currently have each tag applied, with the ability to arbitrarily add new tags to the system. These same tags could then be used by residents to filter their search results.
  • Potential problems here are with scalability / accuracy: how many creators will select tags as opposed to just typing in their own? How unwieldy would this eventually make the drop-down list? How will the tag list be managed to prevent cluttering with typos (e.g. “nial” for “nail”, etc.) & the consequent accidental use of mistyped tags?
  • A suggested solution for the above is to have the field used by creators to add tag names actually display the total number of times an entered tag has been used (so a typo will hopefully show 0). This could also provide an easier means for creators to select existing tags without having to necessarily use a full drop-down list for tags.

In Brief

• The Linden Homes store (see: Looking at the New Linden Homes Store) is to gain search filters for finding themes easier, and also notifications. These should be deployed before year-end.
• There is a known issue with Marketplace fuzzy search such that partial names may not produce anticipated results.
• There was a general discussion on keyword abuse – including some stores using what might be regarded as keywords in product titles (e.g. the use of “bed” in the name of tattoos), which can skew search results (although may not always be intentional).
• There was a repeated request to prevent Marketplace stores using stars in their names, enabling them to show up in searches using the star rating system. This is something the Lab is looking at.
• The end of the meeting includes a general discussion on possible improvements in Marketplace gifting (e.g. allowing direct gifting, without having the items go to the user’s main shopping basket). This was coupled with requests with a more flexible shopping basket system (e.g. having the ability to use a basket to store items for later purchase, whilst also being able to purchase a selection of options within it when going to the check-out).
• LL is still mulling how to best integrate CasperVend with the Marketplace.
• Please refer to the video below for other topics.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, January 3rd, 2024.