Category: News-Opinion

Note: the following is based on a conversation at the end of the TPV developer meeting held on Thursday, April 7th. A video is available, and the discussion commences at the 37:43 mark. As such, the following is my interpretation on matters, rather than an official overview from the Lab.

As most people are aware, the Lab is working with a number of groups across Second Life to re-introduce the Community Gateway programme to help bring new users into Second Life. For more background on this, please refer to be September 2015 introductory blog post on the approach.

The original gateway programme was discontinued in August 2010, with the Lab citing several reasons for doing so, including issues around scalability and management oversight, together with question marks around its overall effectiveness in bringing new users into SL. However, there have been repeated calls over the years for it to be re-introduced, and the planned pilot programme is a response to these calls.

However, as I recently reported, there has been a slight issue around matters of legal compliance. Essentially, the Lab need to ensure that sensitive user information, such as account passwords, have to be handled directly by the Lab’s own registration services – they cannot be passed through a third-party service as would be the case with the new gateways, were they to use the current new user registration API.

To try to get around this, the Lab initially suggested the gateways make use of the “old” user registration API, as used with the original gateway programme. While this does handle account details through the Lab’s services, thus meeting legal requirements, it also has a major downside: there are no hooks into things like the web-based avatar picker. This means that when using it, new users cannot select a modern avatar, but instead are delivered in-world with either the default male or female Character Test Avatar (below) – hardly an ideal approach, given how the test avatars look.

In order to try to improve things, the Lab had toyed with the idea that users would be able sign-up through the third-party gateways, but would have a temporary account password delivered to them via e-mail from the Lab, which they could initially use to log-in to SL, and be able to change via secondlife.com.

While it is actually not uncommon for on-line services to use e-mail exchanges as a part of their sign-up process (e.g. to verify a person’s e-mail address), this approach was seen as potentially too intrusive with the SL sign-up, with fears raised that it could put new users off as the swap back and forth between sign-up pages and e-mail.

In response to this, the Lab are now proposing (and currently QA testing) an alternative approach. During the user registration process, the incoming new user is directed to a secure page hosted by Linden Lab, where they set-up their account details, before being returns to the gateway sign-up pages to complete their on-boarding and coming in-world (so it is like opting to pay for goods on website using your PayPal account and being redirected to PayPal’s secure server to make the payment before being returned to the website).

Some concern has been voiced that this approach may still be off-putting to new users, however, it is hoped that it will be transparent enough to offer a more integrated sign-up flow than would be the case with the use of e-mails. There is still no indication as to when the revised API will be made available to groups in the trial gateway programme, but it has been approved by the Lab’s legal and compliance people, so hopefully once testing has been completed, we should hear more official news about it directly from the Lab.  programme should resume moving forward “soon”.

I first wrote about the Lab’s new Community Gateway trial programme back in September 2015. At the time, it seemed as if the programme was reasonably close to being launched, potentially with up to 20 groups involved, one of them being the Firestorm team, who subsequently soft launched their gateway at the end of October 2015.

However, other than this, there hasn’t been a lot on the programme. So what is going on? Well, there have been one or two problems which are still being ironed out.

One of them is the user registration API by which new users establish their Second Life accounts,and which was initially supplied to groups enrolling in the new gateway trial programme doesn’t have any hooks into the current sign-up process used for Second Life. This means that users signing-up through it will not be able to pick one of the starter avatars offered by the registration process, but instead will initially arrive in-world using the male or female default Character Test avatars which (a long while ago now) replaced the infamous “Ruth” avatar.

Obviously, this is far from ideal. First impressions count, and many people seeing their avatar for the first time and comparing it to the glossy images on the landing pages could end up feeling a tad bit aggrieved or disappointed and might even simply log off. This being the case, the Lab has been working on an updated API which will both address the avatar issue and apparently offer some other options as well. This was revealed by Ebbe Altberg during his session at the 2016 Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education conference, on Wednesday, March 9th:

We also have a lot of interesting things coming in the pipeline. An improved registration API, so that it will be easier for institutions to bring on their customers or clients or students in a more pre-configured way: choosing what avatars they can select from, getting them set-up in the proper groups, and taking them through a whole custom on-board experience.

Another issue has been has been a matter of compliance and ensuring the correct safeguards are in place with regards who can collect what data – an important consideration when users will be signing-up to Second Life via gateways hosted on non-Lab servers. On this, Ebbe informed the VWBPE audience:

The Community Gateway programme is very much proceeding. I don’t have like a final ship date for it; it goes very much hand-in-hand with the registration API work we have to do. We had to spend some more time on that than we originally thought, again for compliance; because who can collect what information in what context is something we had to solve for.

However, he indicated that things are now very much on track and a launch of the programme could be “just around the corner”. In addition, he also indicated that in order to help attract very specific audiences / market verticals to second Life – such as educators and education institutions and groups – the Lab is considering establishing its own gateways as well:

But once we get some community gateways going, we might even do some community gateways ourselves that are more vertically specific and make it more obvious to educators how to get on the platform, how to discover educationally relevant content, etc. That’s something we would like to do for a number of different verticals. It just remains to be seen which of those gateways we might operate versus which ones are better managed by in-world groups or teams or companies.

This aspect of dedicated gateways could be particularly pertinent to encouraging more specialised verticals into Second Life. If nothing else, having the gateways run directly by Linden Lab instils a level for trust which might be harder to establish between client and gateway where the latter is being run by a small group (albeit very dedicated) Second Life users who may not necessarily have any legal or other affiliation with the client or the platform. For another,  the Lab can probably market such gateways to their prospective audience a lot more energetically then might otherwise be the case, simply because they have the budget to do so.

So. The Community Gateway programme is still on its way, and it will be interesting to see which communities are directly involved, and how Linden Lab go about offering their own vertically specific gateways.