On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, under the title Improving Marketplace Search and Product Discovery, Linden Lab new new Second Life Marketplace maintenance policies designed to help improve the shopping experience. The approach builds on operations carried out in the past on a periodic manual basis, but will not be carried out on a monthly basis using automated tools.
The new policy comprises two parts:
- Unlisting products:
- If a Merchant has not logged in for one year AND a specific product has not generated a sale in one year, that individual product listing will be automatically unlisted from Marketplace.
- Disabling stores:
- If a Merchant has not logged in for two years AND their store has not sold anything in one year, the entire store will be automatically disabled.
Important notes for context:
- In Both of the above policies, products and stores will only be acted upon if both elements of the criteria are met during a review.
- Neither policy option will result in anything being physically deleted from the Marketplace; affected products and/or stores will simply cease to be visible when browsing the Marketplace and in things like search returns.
- Merchants will be able to reactivate unlisted products / disabled stores by logging into the Marketplace and updating them.
- Active merchants and actively maintained products will not be affected by these changes.
- These new policies for products and stores will come into effect on Monday, August 17, 2026.
In order to avoid accidental / incorrect unlisting of products / stores, the blog post suggests merchants periodically:
- Review older or lower-performing listings.
- Refresh product listings, images, descriptions, or pricing to help improve visibility and sales activity.
As noted, there have been manual operations to clean-up the Marketplace in a similar manner to this is the past, and requests for the de-listing of inactive products has been frequently requested during Web User Group (WUG) meetings, so these new policies appear to be aimed at making making the process easier to handle via automaton whilst also addressing the requests made at the WUG meetings.
Those with any concerns / feedback on these polices can raise them through the forums or via the WUG meetings, the next one of which will take place as follows:
- 14;00 SLT, Wednesday, September 2, 2026 at this location. Note that meetings are held in a mix of Voice and text chat.
- Summaries of past Web User Group meetings are available here.
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