January 2025 SL Web User Group summary

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday January 8th, 2025. 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.

Table of Contents Meeting Overview General Update Web Properties Refresh Project Zero (Viewer Streamed to a Browser) In Brief Date of Next Meeting

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.

General Update

[Video: 0:40-3:40 and 7:36-8:20]

• Pre-Holiday Marketplace issues:
  • There were some outages and slow delivery times on the Marketplace in the run-up to the holidays.
  • Due to these problems, store holders were unable to see the view count on their Top Selling Products report, as it was not reporting correctly. This has now been corrected, and the view count is once more reporting correctly, and will not be removed from the report.
  • The underlying causes of all of these issues should now be fixed. Anyone experiencing continued problems WRT them should file a ticket.
• Decimal point values manifesting on L$ amounts: users noted that places such as the Marketplace cashier page started displaying decimal point valves on L$ amounts (e.g. L$50.98). This was not intentional, and should now be corrected. Again, anyone still seeing it should file a ticket.
• Related Items Display on MP listings: an issue with Related Items not displaying correctly on Marketplace project listings has been fixed and related items should all display correctly, even when resizing the browser window smaller.
• [Video: 7:36-8:20] Featured News Blog feed:  the Feature News blog widget on the default viewer log-in screen (“Linden News” on Firestorm) is currently broken.

• • This may also be causing Featured News failing to display on the dashboard (which might display something like Grid Status instead).
  • LL are working to correct this problem.

Web Properties Refresh

[Video: 3:47-6:08]

• The pages at community.secondlife.com have been refreshed as a part of the overall drive to update the appearance of the various pages / sites.

• • Four page themes are offered on refreshed pages: Light Classic, Light New, Dark Classic, and Dark New (the default). These can be selected via the Themes drop-down link at the foot of refreshed pages:

• • • Issues have been reported when displaying Knowledge Base articles in the new layout (not clear if this is in general or specific to the Dark mode(s)), and LL are working to rectify these issues.
    • Again, if anyone notes specific issues with page displays in any of the themes, please file a ticket.
  • Updated, January 9th: Similar work in planned for the dashboard (secondlife.com), although at the time of writing, this has yet to be surfaced – although Sntax Linden indicated it was “very close to being deployed”. The initial Dashboard refresh has been deployed.

• Within secondlife.com, the What Next? section (top menu bar and https://secondlife.com/my/whatnext/) is also to be significantly updated, as much of it is very dated in content. However, the time frame for this surfacing is still TBD.

Project Zero (Viewer Streamed to a Browser)

[Video: 33:00-48:22]

• For background (if you need it!) see: Second Life in your browser: a new initiative from Linden Lab).
• Sntax Linden indicated that this can also be a subject for discussion at WUG meetings (he is on of those leading the work), although it may evolve into having its own user group in the future.
• Overall response appears positive, although some appear to have pain points – notably with multi-factor authentication causing problems in loading the viewer. This was thought to have been fixed, but still appears to be an issue.
• The time limit for Project Zero has now been increased to 1 hour per session (from 10 minutes).

• Reasons as to why people might not use the services (currently still free) given at the meeting included:
  • Inability to: save viewer Preferences; perform uploads; save chat IM logs, etc.
  • Lack of Firestorm support.
  • No in-built (client-side) AO for avatars.
  • Most of the above are on the roadmap – see my article in the link at the top of this section – although TPV support is dependent on TPVs being willing to engage in the project as it continues to be developed.
• There have been reports of zero.secondlife.com not working on Brave (Chrome derived browser) which were thought to have been fixed; however Brave still hangs without loading the viewer (the same is true for Gener8, Vivaldi and Epic, all of which, like Brave, are heavy on privacy browsing).
• Note that from the 48 minute point onwards, this conversation devolves in discussions on food.

In Brief

• A further discussion on https://maps.secondlife.com/ following that of the December 2024 meeting, this focused on the search function and how it arrives at its results, given they do not appear to be region / parcel based.
  • This segued into a wider discussion of map searches and sources used, accuracy of returns, preferred means of searching for places (e.g. SL search – then use the Map link in the relevant result, or use Maps (in-world or web), etc.
  • As a part of the more general search comments, it was suggested that when users have Maturity ratings set (e.g. only G or only M), search indicated that results are limited due to the set rating.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, February 5th, 2025.