Day: November 6, 2025

November 2025 SL Web User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday November 5th, 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.

Updates

  • Upgrades to Marketplace tech stack and adding resilience to systems in the case of external outages (as happened this summer with Elastic Search).
  • Further account security initiatives which will be rolling out soon, some of which should help prevent attempts at account take-overs.
  • The roll-out of the “No Stipend” Premium Plus subscription. See:
  • Marketplace PLE blip:
    • PLEs were not charged between October 6th through October 28th inclusive, although subscriptions were still active and running. This caused a batch charge to occur on October 28th, which proved difficult for merchants.
    • If any merchants believe they were charged more than once as a result of these issues, please raise a support ticket.
    • LL is now working on adding more logging to these systems to prevent similar situations in the future.
  • Quality of life updates:
    • A fix to correct viewer splash screen images being cut off.
    • A fix for a display bug were review font sizes were off.
  • Under-the-hood work including:
    • Completion of the Python library upgrade for internal services.
    • A Redis upgrade which should improve shopping cart contents persistence across sessions.

General Discussion

  • The question of Marketplace / CasperVend integration was once again raised. The short answer to this is:
    • Yes, the Lab would like to work on integration between Marketplace and the in-world shopping experience offered by CasperVend, but this requires working on some baseline tech and updates which have yet to be put in place.
    • The Lab is also keen to see a bi-directional unification of features between CasperVend and the Marketplace (e.g. features of CasperVend such as gift cards, better support for sales and discounts being extended to the MP, and features within the MP not found within CasperVend also being extended that way).
    • Currently there are no time frames as to when any of this work is likely to surface.
  • A request was made for merchants to be able to delete “negative” or “harassing” reviews (a problematic request as best, given it could open the door to the deletion of any “negative” review a merchant takes issue with, no matter how valid the actual critique).
    • It was pointed out that there are already the means to flag genuinely harassing, etc., viewers.
    • It was also indicated that a request had been put forward to make the names of reviewers active links, allowing others users to click and see all reviews by a given individual, thus allowing them to better judge the reviewer’s objectiveness.
  • The request to make Marketplace images clickable to display larger version / to zoom-in on them was again raised.
    • It was indicated that LL are considering implementing some form of image zoom capability / support for higher-resolution images on MP listings.
    • However, with the focus on quality of life improvements, bug fixes, etc., this work has yet to be prioritised.
    • This led to a further discussion on MP images encompassing their use by the visually impaired, how Amazon handles images, etc.
  • Kali Linden noted another capability that is being considered is that of a “Demo / Try Before You Buy” button within MP listings. However, (and again), how this might work and when it might actually be implemented is still open to question.
  • A discussion on listings & translations and sometimes listing being mis-translated, which rolled into a general discussion on the presentation of the Marketplace website (not making full use of the browser tab width), issues with people mistaking items in the Featured section on the MP homepage as “recommended” items, rather than paid advertising; new users being unable to easily differentiate between “modern” content (e.g. good mesh with (or without) PBR and older flexiprim or sculptie content or low-resolution skins etc.),  as by default, listings do not offer any indication of an item’s age (e.g. when first uploaded), etc.
  • A discussion on the Second Life dashboard and possible improvements. Suggestions included:
    • Making the Friends Online and Groups lists more usable (e.g. so that Friends and Groups can actually be managed from them rather than having to go in-world to do so)
    • Displaying Group notices within a section of the dashboard.
    • Making elements such as Friends Online pop-outs in their own browser frames.
    • Updating the Blogs section with the feeds from the SL Blogger Network feeds as well as including the official blogs.
    • Implementing a dark mode for the pages in line with other SL pages / portal (e.g. the Linden Homes pages and the Land portal).
    • Providing more in the way of dynamic / updated content to encourage engagement, together with more informative communications from the Lab.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025.