The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday July 2nd, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript.
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), and 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 Work in Progress
- Still making progress on marketplace responsive work, mostly focused on search.
- Doing some updates on technical upgrades to critical internal services.
- Investigations into the current marketplace page response delays.
General Discussion
The meeting revolved around a number of questions asked of attendees.
- Complete avatars – a series of questions on the subject of complete avatars (as defined by the Marketplace category): How how many of merchants have sold a complete avatars on the Marketplace or CasperVend; do merchants have a higher rate of complaint regarding full avatar sales compared to other items they might sell; did anyone at the meeting use a complete avatar.
- Given the lack of merchants at the meeting, the first two questions were largely moot.
- Some at the meeting did indicate they have used complete avatars, but feedback was somewhat limited.
- A general discussion on very first purchases made in Second Life – for the oldbies in the group, hair was genrrally one of the first purchases.
- A discussion around a feature request to add a dynamic map to the viewer log-in splash screen. Responses were mixed.
- Some saw it as an import means of communicating “how vast” Second Life is to new users.
- Others (myself included) saw it as potentially being confusing / meaningless to new users – as per the the comment on the feature request by Bavid Dailey. How big Second Life is a minor aspect of the platform when compared to providing people with a means to get to the places they want to be (e.g. via in-world portals, by LMs). In all likelihood; new users will barely grasp the concept of a SLurl or how to enter it with the correct format in the (already available) Location field – ergo, adding a scrolling map on the splash screen adds very little to their experience.
- There is also the question of technical complexity of implementing a scrolling map within the viewer that is up-to-date with the current state of the grid.
- A short discussion on how easy / difficult it is to get people engaged in Second Life, and what is required to help get them engaged.
- Some responses came down to the simplistic (and not necessarily accurate) “single-point” requirement for engagement (e.g. better in-world building tools – while definitely a good-to-have, such tools are still only one aspect of engagement).
- Others came down to finding the right way to approach people about Second Life (e.g. in my case, by aligning SL to the interests friends have).
- More broadly, comments encompassed the patience required to understand the complexities of the viewer and Second Life; the perception of Second Life held by people outside of SL (or were once engaged and departed) that the platform is “old”, “dated”, etc., in comparison to modern games.
Next Meeting
- Wednesday, August 6th, 2025.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 