Day: June 4, 2026

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday June 3rd 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 at 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.

Web Services Updates

The focus of work for the past month has been mainly on under-the-hood updates and preparing for upcoming releases. This work includes:

• Authentication/email service upgrades.
  • Aimed at providing better security.
  • Also includes a migration to LL’s own e-mail service.
  • This work is about to go to QA for testing.
• The refresh of the web-base land / region purchasing pages is now going through QA. This is seen as the second part of the Land Portal overhaul which started with the refresh of the Linden Homes pages.
• Search updates:
  • Improvements being made to web search. Once this work is deployed, the team will focus on fine tuning things like search results.
  • Work on adding the ability to search by region on the web-based world map is now in progress.
• Marketplace: work:
  • The Responsive Marketplace Homepage is due to go through QA.
  • There is a review of Marketplace listings in progress, aimed at de-listing (not deleting) items where the creator has not logged-in to SL for a considerable period and the item hasn’t generated any sales. Part of this work is also to automate the de-listing process.
  • General Marketplace background work.
• Under-the-hood upgrades to the new user join flow.
• The web team has been reviewing their general workflow as a whole and how work is managed (some of it with a view to automating suitable tasks, such as the MP listings clean-up mentioned above).
• The cookie prompt constantly appearing in places like the viewer Web Search tab and which can pop-up in SL web services  where it may not be required (or actually feeds a cookie to the viewer) is acknowledged as being too aggressive, and there is a review underway to ensure it only appears when required.

Trust and Safety Town Hall / User Group

• There have been internal discussions on LL’s Trust and Safety team should hold Town Hall meeting or start their own User Group meeting.
• Trust and Safety is responsible for ensuring a safe and secure environment for users by enforcing community standards, addressing user reports of misconduct, and protecting user privacy. They also manage issues related to user safety and the integrity of the virtual economy.
• A request was made for topics to discuss (presumably to help determine which would be more beneficial: a Town Hall or a regular UG meeting). The primary topic suggested concerned Marketplace / phishing scam links, including:
  • Providing a Firestorm 7.2.4 like capability to unmask URLs pasted into in Group chat / chat / IMs using square braces – see here for more).
  • More controls for Group owners to manage the use of links, etc., within their Group chats (e.g. limiting links to “safe” sites – gyazo, Flickr, and similar; the ability to specify if a Role within the Group can post links; support for whitelisting links, etc.).
  • As a part of this discussion it was noted that LL is looking:
    • To add further account security options beyond the recent e-mail verification push.
    • To broaden of MFA options (to further encourage users to protect their accounts against hacking & the risk of their accounts a) being rubbed of any L$ balance; b) being used to to drop phishing links to all groups associated with the account).
• This discussion became quite protracted through the meeting from around 10 minutes in through to around 25 minutes, but the general consensus was that a Town Hall or regular UG meeting would be useful.

General Discussion

• In light of recent (over the last year?) issues with the Second Life wiki going down, with a request for a monthly downloadable package of the wiki to be made available for those interested in viewing it offline.
  • It was acknowledged the wiki has in the past been badly hit with LLMs and bots data-scraping and causing it to fall over; however, it is believed that countermeasures to prevent the problem have been put in place. Those still seeing the wiki being down for extended periods should file a report via Canny.
  • Offering a downloadable version of the wiki was seen as problematic as the information within it is subject to change; however, there might be other options for making the information available (subject to priorities), and a Canny report was against requested.
  • This resulted in a general discussion on the wiki – such as perhaps having a compressed (and regularly updated) archive available for people to view; encrypting IP address for those making active edits to the wiki, etc.
• The above led to a wider discussion on the general visibility of various SL web-based properties and their general use, including the fact that many users never even use their Second Life dashboard at secondlife.com/my, as it is not known about / is not seen as dynamic / informative enough (Something I’ve raised directly with LL numerous times).
  • There is a review in progress to see if various web pages like the dashboard could be refreshed/ updated.
• Items raised but outside of the Web Teams responsibility:
  • A request was made for a limited sandbox area to be included in the SLB regions to allow folk to a) rez gifts, etc.; b) take part in impromptu building classes and similar.  This was seen as a good idea for future SLBs, and will be taken back to the Lab.
  • The suggestion was made that some means of identifying Lab-managed regions should be added to the viewer Legacy Search (e.g. the Places tab), so that things like “official” sandboxes appear as the first returned following a search on such, thus assuring users the destination is “safe” (as much as a sandbox can can “safe”!) for them. This was seen as something that could perhaps be implemented within the Web Search.
  • A conversation on allowing a switchable (by region holder / estate managers?) option to enable region-wide chat. This was seen as useful in welcome hubs, etc., where incoming users can often arrive, ask a question via chat and then wander out of range before getting a reply – and then miss it, leading to them thinking they are being ignored.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, July 1st, 2026.