March 2026 SL Web User Group

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday March 4th 2026. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. Pantera’s video is embedded at the end of this article, my thanks to her for providing it.

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.

Friday February 27th Marketplace Outage

On Friday, February 27th, 2026, the Marketplace suffered an outage resulting in delays to item deliveries, background check-outs and viewer notifications for approximately 5 hours. This was apparently caused by a degradation in the MP asynchronous workers during a deployment, resulting in a backlog in the MP queuing system. The backlog should be clear now, and there have been no recent reports of missing / delayed items or notifications.

Updates

• Changes are being made to the email verification prompt that comes up on the Second Life dashboard – those who have verified their email won’t see anything (“for a while”). Those who haven’t verified their email address for contact are advised to do so.
• Updates to the web maps to allow searching by region name is still “slotted” for implementation.
• Updates are in progress for the buying land experience – the look and presentation of the pages, UI changes, etc. – not changes to current land pricing.
• The viewer splash screen will be changing soon as a part of the viewer UI / font changes contained in the upcoming 2026.02 viewer.
• Work on making the Marketplace home page more responsive on Mobile devices is continuing, with small changes already made to the sidebar.
• Quality of Life / Internal updates:
  • Further guardrails have been placed around Marketplace Product Listing Enhancements (PLEs) to prevent users being double-charged.
  • Multiple bug fixes related to wishlist displays, language selections and display name synchronisation, and similar.
  • Upgrades are being made to some web-related AWS services.

Marketplace

• Th question was asked if people felt it would be worth a break of 12-18 months on work on all Marketplace development (bug fixing, etc., still continuing), in order to get variants / styles (e.g. multiple colour options, etc.,) in a single listing produced and released.
  • Whilst stated that a “year / year-and-a-half” was “very conservative”, it was still something of a surprised given that in late 2022, Reed Linden stated variants would be the “first deployment” in 2023.
  • Spidey Linden noted that the biggest hurdle with the project is actually migrating users as smoothly as possible from having multiple listings for the same item (but in different colours) to having all options in the one listing.
  • There was support for the idea and variants  / styles is something that has long been promised and has been a popular request.
• The above spun-out into a discussion on “Marketplace 2.0”.
  • Currently there are no plans for a “Marketplace 2.0”, so this was more a “throw out ideas” session.
  • This discussion also spun out into requests for “social” elements to be included on MP listing, such as a indicator as to when a store owner last logged-in to SL, the date any item was posts to the MP (already available via some 3rd party browser plug-ins, support Firefox, Edge and Chrome and its variants – I use it with both Brave and Gener8).
• An alterative question regarded on “Marketplace 2.0”, were it to be developed, is whether merchants would access not having any migration mechanism and having to go through and manually re-list all their items on the new version.
  • This caused something of a divided response, with some seeing it as not being a problem for MP stores with large inventories, as it was argued (not unreasonably in the case of clothing), that the reason for many stores having large numbers of listings is because they have multiple colour version of each item, each with it own listing – which any new Marketplace would solve by allowing multiple variants in a single listing.
  • Others felt any requirement to manually upload to a new MP would slow adoption.
  • Still others felt that having a new MP with “more features” would still be worth the effort to give them a new, cleaner & more functional store.
• It was suggested that some of the pain in moving to a “new” MP could be eased by offering an extended transition period to allow creators to gradually make the move.
  • However, it was pointed out that running two systems side-by-side will incur additional cost and so a) would have to be factored-in to the transition period; b) would likely preclude both the current MP and “MP 2.0” running side-by-side indefinitely; sooner or later merchants would have to move.
  • There is also the risk of consumer confusion over where to find items if the transition period is drawn out to the point where creators migrate their listings in small quantities (“one or two a week” was mentioned), which could then impact sales.
• Calls were made to simply delete stores from the Marketplace on the basis of the creator not logging-in to SL for a given continuous period (currently, listings are made “inactive” if the owner has not logged-in during a certain period). This is a potentially damaging approach, as it could unfairly penalise users who are forced into a more restricted ability to log-in to SL due to social circumstance, illness, etc.
• The discussion on “MP 2.0” spun out to include integration of CasperVend and the ability to see through the MP and via in-world vendor kiosks.
• A request was make to solve the “translation issue” whereby automatic translation of products leads to things like the wrong colour being delivered (e.g. a translation referencing the “pink” item for delivery, whereas the listing shows the “red” version.

Other Items

• Community Pages / Forums Changes:
  • Concerns were raised over recent changes to the Community pages (e.g. the official blogs) / Forums — notably around logging-in.
  • These concerns took two parts:
    1. The fact that the logging-in process has been changed by the third party providing the community pages / Forum platform (Invision) to use OAuth as their authentication method, rather than the Lab’s own MFA;
    2. There was no announcement of the change by Linden Lab via blog or Forum post, in advance of it being made by Invision across their services.
  • The concern over the use of cookies seems to be (in part) born of misunderstanding: cookies are a “standard” means of maintaining login session IDs. However OAuth appears to be retaining the cookie after a user has physically logged-out from the Community pages via the sign-out option (which does not mean logging-out of SL), which appears to be the problem.
  • Kermit Linden offered to look into the authorisation flow.

• The issue of  SL wiki thumbnail images not displaying has been partially resolved, but more work is required to completely resolve it.
• A request was made to add a further SL Discord generic category for those whose blogs fall outside the current three categories of  fashion, home & garden and bloggers-streamers.
• Complaints that 2 clicks to reach a person’s transaction history on the SL dashboard, and Marketplace is too hard and the labelling is not precise (which is fair).
• A general discussion on web search and its perceived drawbacks (such as being unable to exclude display Names from People searches, thus leading to “false positives” when seeking user names etc.)..
• A discussion on being able to “register” brand names with LL to prevent things like copycat stores using the same name, or having stores using the sane name / word in their keywords coming ahead of registered stores in MP searches.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, April 1st, 2026.