Day: July 4, 2024

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday July 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.

Note: This meeting was entirely text-based.

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.

Improvements and Updates from the Web Team Planned for the Coming Year

Marketplace on Mobile and MFA on the Marketplace

• The Marketplace will have a first release of being mobile responsive in the coming weeks (“not months”).
  • This will be rolled out slowly so some users may see it before others.
• This release will focus on making the the product listing pages and checkout page more responsive and display better at specific break points (including on mobile devices).
• Once the initial work on making the above pages more responsive has been deployed, LL will be adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) to the Marketplace
  • This will be an extension to the current MFA implementation covering secondlife.com dashboards and the viewer.
  • As with the current MFA, it will be opt-in on the Marketplace, and required on logging-in (presumably, whenever a token has expired).
  • Information on enabling MFA on the Marketplace will be made available nearer the time it will be made available.
• Alongside the MFA implementation, there will be likely be further changes to Marketplace search algorithm.
  • Once this work is deployed, LL will be looking at how it changes transactions, and receiving merchant feedback on the Feedback Portal.
• After the MFA work and search updates, work will resume on making the Marketplace more responsive / mobile device friendly.
  • This work will focus on MP search and the shopping cart.
  • However, a fully responsive Marketplace is not anticipated before the end of the year.
• In addition to the above, there will be some general quality of life updates on the MP, including things like a button to confirm clearing the shopping cart.

Additional MFA Discussion

The announcement of MFA coming to the Marketplace led to a further general discussion and exchange of ideas on the MFA implementation in general, including:

• The need for better safeguards to prevent large-scale Linden dollar movements in the event of an account being compromised.
  • Even with MFA, an account is vulnerable to being compromised and its L$ balance being access through the viewer.
  • The suggestion was made that MFA should therefore be additionally requested when attempting to move large values of L$ from an account. This was combined with the idea of the same in the event of multiple transaction above a certain level in a short amount of time.
  • Obviously, what constitutes a “large transaction” and a “short amount of time” would require consideration and be balanced against users becoming frustrated the MFA process and then opting-out (thus defeating the purpose in having it).
• This broadened into a discussion of MFA being triggered more in common with other web services: e.g. an alert being sent via e-mail if a log-in is detected from an unexpected / new device, an unrecognised location, etc., allowing the account holder to take action, if required.
• There was a further request for e-mail based authentication or SMS code-based authentication.
  • E-mail has been promised in the past, but is potentially prone to easy compromise.
  • SMS + code is not seen as insecure, and not likely to be implement, particularly given the general move away from it that is taking place.
• Kali Linden reiterated, the current plan is to enhance and expand the current MFA, not re-invent the wheel.

In Brief

• Maps.sl:
  • Garfield Linden is overhauling maps.sl as an after-hours project. His focus is on:
  • Bringing it to feature parity with Maps-in-the-viewer.
  • Making it mobile-friendly (e.g. with a search bar that floats over the map tiles, like maps.google.com).
  • If anyone has simple ideas for how it might additionally be improved etc., input to him or via the Feedback Portal.
• Changing to WUG meeting frequency (date / time):
  • The web team is looking to add ” a second web user group meet with a different time that is more accommodating for residents then our SLT time zone meeting”.
  • Noon SLT was considered (by the small number of attendees) as a preferable time.
  • Sntax Linden arbitrarily selected Tuesday, July 30th as the date for the first of these additional meetings- HOWEVER, 12:00 noon on the 30th July brings any WUG meeting directly into conflict with the Simulator User Group meeting (and there is audience cross-over between the two). As such, the date / time of any additional WUG meeting has yet to be confirmed.
  • Ironically, since the request was made for an additional meetings (initially on the basis of getting more frequent updates / input, rather than issues over the time), attendance at the WUG meetings has been in decline.

Next Meeting(s)

• Wednesday, August 7th, 2024, any alternate TBC – check the SL public calendar.