October 2024 SL Web User Group summary

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday October 2nd, 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.

General Update

Data Feeds

[Video: 1:38-2:36]

• Updates to the Lab’s internal data warehousing infrastructure resulted in some breakages to the data feeds API providing metrics (number of users logged-in, etc), for use by external services and the count of users in regions listed in the Destination Guide.
• These breakages should now all be now be fixed.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

[Video: 2:42-3:21]

• MFA is being extended across all of the Lab’s web properties, so those opting-in to MFA will find at times that they may have to re-authenticate when accessing a wider range of Second Life web properties.
• This work is expected to surface during the October-December 2024.
• Hopefully, a blog post will be provided as this role-out goes ahead.

Marketplace and Web Properties Updates

[Video: 3:23-5:30]

• The Marketplace has been undergoing a facelift with its layout, together with other web properties.
• With the MP, the changes have been intended to make in more Mobile-friendly and making it more responsive, particularly with mobile.
• The deployment on the MP to Mobile had been referenced in the July 2024 WUG meeting, and it is hoped MP for mobile will be “totally shipped” by the end of October 2024.

• More is to be done with this, and once things are moved further along, it is likely their will be a more formal announcement on changes made and why.
• [Video: 6:33-6:56] The overall aim of the changes across all web properties is to make them all consistent in terms of look and general functionality (e.g. colours, were to find links, etc., in the header / footer areas, etc.
• There was assorted feedback provided for the MP page layout (e.g. the image sliders, the use of orange, the layout of the a user drop-down menu and use of sub-menus to display options, together with concerns over colour choices and readability for those with visual impairments.

  General Discission

• [Video: 5:33-5:59] Marketplace Variants:
  • Variants (at one time “Styles” – e.g. having multiple colour options for an item in a single listing) was again raised.
  • Despite being something stated as being in the works by Reed Linden (since departed from LL) as long a two years ago, and being reported as close to being available for release a year ago, it is once again something the Lab “want to do”.
  • Apparently, there designs for the idea, but “it’s definitely not happening this calendar year” (no surprises there), but is is noted as something “people want”.
• [Video: 9:54-10:30] Dark Mode UI:
  • “Most” web properties will move towards offering a dark mode UI, “but its going to be a while” before this reaches the Marketplace.

• [Video: 10:49-12:35]  Further Web Property Updates / Refreshes
  • As a part of the web properties refresh, both the Second Life dashboard (secondlife.com) and the associated Account pages below it will be received some TLC.
  • The Log-in and download pages for the viewer will also be receiving a more responsive, dark mode update.
  • This work is apparently targeting Q4 of 2024.
• [Video: 12:43-19:03] New user sign-up discussion – and extensive discussion on user sign-up page, including:
  • Lack of explanation around the choice of user name and its potential impact (e.g. being display in the avatar’s name tag, etc.). Which has in turn led to people using their physical world names or gibberish name in the believe that this information will not be shown and they’ll have the ability to create an alias / persona once in-world (as done with many MMOs).
  • Lack of any password confirmation field to account for mis-types when entering a password.
  • It was noted that some joining the Lab have the same issue vis: user name.
• [Video: 19:33-23:18] Marketplace Categories a discussion on potential new categories and overhauling the Categories listing. Please refer to the video.
• [Video: 23:56-37:35 and 42:38-44-35] Discussion on flagging items on the MP and on the stars + reviews:
  • Categories for flagging.
  • Ability to flag reviews that have been responded to as responded to / resolved.
  • Providing a guide for star rating (e.g. 1 = bad; 3 = perfectly OK; 5 = absolutely outstanding).
  • Providing review incentives / reminders.
  • Suggestions on (God help us) “Marketplace Influencers” based on the reviews they give.
  • Allowing reviews on the MP for items purchased in-world but available on the MP (which is under discussion at LL using CasperVend).
  • Refer to the video for more.
• [Video: 44:39-49:29] L$1 demo discussion – please refer to the video.
• [Video: 49:40-50:48] Marketplace API:
  • This has been requested a number of time.
  • LL is engaged in some design work around the idea.
  • However, due to the complexity of the Marketplace and its development history, it is not an easy task to tackle. There are also some “non-Marketplace technical hurdles” to cross as well.
• Please refer to the end of the video for the rounding-out of the above discussions of listing, demos, and categories.

Next Meeting(s)

• Wednesday, November 6th, 2024.