The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday January 3rd, 2024. 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
The meeting started with an apology for the issue over the New Year period which included items merchants were trying to list failing to appear, items and stores failing to show up in search results (see BUG-234924). The Lab believe the causes of the issues have been fixed, and processes have been put in place for the back-end systems to better alert support / engineering when issues of this nature occur.
A request was also made for any merchants still experiencing problems in trying to list items or in having their items / stores show up in searches, to file a Jira with LL.
The above was followed by a meeting-length discussion with what are seen as getting to be long-term terms issues with the MP, some of which are the results of changes which have inadvertently given rise to opportunities for the Marketplace to be gamed, and merchants losing revenue as a result. Key among the complaints being made were (but not limited to):
- Active stores seeming to vanish from the Marketplace entirely.
- Listed items failing to show up in any searches.
- Exploits such as items being falsely labelled in the Product title field producing misleading search results.
- Exploits being opened as a result of the 2022/23 overhaul of ElasticSearch (the engine powering MP searches), and relevancy weightings being given to product titles .
- Exploits allowing spamming through the features tab which further influences search results in favour of those doing the spamming.
It was noted that these issues – including the problems of items and stores not appearing in searches – go back over several months (rather the the issue witnessed over the new year period being a “one off”), and they are giving rises to across-the-board upset and frustration among MP merchants, and with their customers.
The conversation was very much one in which people spelled out the issues being experienced, whilst Lab representatives at the meeting mostly listened and took notes. This being the case, and rather than risk parsing the meeting through my own subjective presence as someone who is not a merchant, I will refer readers to the video of the meeting as embedded below, and encourage anyone experiencing any of the issues raised to file a Jira bug report with Linden Lab on the matter.
Marketplace Styles
- Part of the above discussion touched on Marketplace Styles (allowing things like different colour variants for a product in a single listing).
- This was promised as being an active project throughout 2022, with (the since departed) Reed Linden stating in November 2022 (see November 2022 Web User Group: new “Plus” subscription level) the capability could appear before the end of that year or in 2023.
- As more than a year has passed without mention, I raised the topic at the end of the meeting, requesting the actual status of the work (particularly as when it was raised in 2023, not long after Sntax Linden has taken over the WUG meetings, he did not appear to be aware of the project). The response was:
Styles is at the top of my list for things for MP. Just need to find the right time to slot it in. I can’t promise when but I am hopeful we can make headway on it this year.
– Sntax Linden
- Which probably means that if you are a Merchant who has been looking forward to this capability, probably best not to hold your breath for its arrival. Unless you’re especially fond of blue.
Next Meeting
- Wednesday, March 6th, 2024.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 