September 2025 SL Web User Group

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday September 3rd, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

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.

Announcements

• The AI Character Generation beta has been spun down. See: LL announce a pause in the current SL AI character designer project for more.
• All of the original Linden Homes micro-continents have been decommissioned.
  • Remaining holders of these homes have been transitioned over to the current Linden Homes selections.
  • All of the V1 Linden Home regions have been removed from the grid and the associated Linden Home V1 web-based home control pages have been archived.

Updates

• As the August Web User Group was ending, the Marketplace the third-party Elastic Search instance experienced a significant failure, causing a very significant Marketplace outage. This caused some merchants were mistakenly charged multiple times for Product Listing Enhancements, which were all refunded.
  • If any merchant believes they are still out of balance, please open a support ticket.
  • The Marketplace team is working to stabilise the Marketplace and add more resiliency to MP systems to handle external outages.
• Various bug fixes with Marketplace Responsive Search have been released, together with various clean-up tickets around support, land, and region store
• A further tease  – without specifics – of an upcoming announcement “in the next few weeks” related to balancing-out the economy and providing more Linden Dollar sinks (see: An Update from Linden Lab – Linden Dollar Exchange Rate and the Economy – July 2025).

General Discussion

• Open question from Juniper Linden: If you could remove one feature/aspect of Marketplace, what would it be? Responses went beyond the scope of the question and included:
  • Revert the change that makes “classified” ads at the top of search returns less obvious than they used to be (e.g. re-add the border around them or highlight them).
  • Refining the best-selling items section of the Marketplace (e.g. break it into price ranges / prevent it showing items which were on a short-term offer – e.g. L$75 for a day or so, but have since reverted to their full price, etc., or resetting an item so it doesn’t appear in the Best Selling list for the week in which its listing has been altered).
  • Improved filtering for searches (e.g. by body type).
  • Filtering-out AI generated content (assuming it is properly self-reported as such within the listings, which currently isn’t possible, nor is how AI been used in a product  – for example, is the item itself created using AI tools, or only the scripts within it?).
• The default for the number of items shown on a Marketplace Page (e.g. following a search) has been altered from 96 to 48 (with the drop-down offering 24, 48 and 96 items per page options).
• The above led to a discussion on further redefining the Marketplace product categories – notably around the avatar (e.g. having an Avatar category, with sub-categories such as Body Parts, Shapes, Hair, etc.).
• Web map (maps.secondlife.com) and following-on from the August meeting:
  • The issue Web map can’t find region in URL without trailing slash appears to have been fixed.
  • The issue Apostrophes Break SL Web Map appears to be awaiting a server/simulator update to fix.
• This is a reported issue where, if you have been given the ability to see a friend on the in-world Map and can teleport to them, the teleport may fail if they are on a region with a space in its name, as the space breaks the SLurl.
• A request was made to have a web page in the nature of the Land Auctions page, but specifically for rentals, rather than relying on search / the in-world world map. This was seen as a good idea for the Lab to consider, but would need further consideration in order to fit-in to the development roadmap.
• Note: during the above question, a group of unicellular organisms attempted to disrupt the final ten minutes of the meeting. However, as the majority of the topics had been discussed, Pantera has wisely cut the attempt from the meeting video, which jumps to the closing remarks.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, October 1st, 2025.