The following notes are taken from my recording of the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021. These meetings are generally held on the first Wednesday of the month, with dates and venue details available via the SL public calendar.
When reading these notes, please keep in mind:
- This is not intended as a chronological transcript of the meeting. Items are drawn together by topic, although they may have been discussed at different points in the meeting.
- Similarly, and if included, any audio extracts appearing in these summaries are presented by topic heading, rather than any chronological order in which they may have been raised during the meeting (e.g. if “topic X” is mentioned early in a meeting and then again half-way through a meeting, any audio comments related to that topic that might be included in these reports will be concatenated into a single audio extract.
Web Properties Updates
- Core work remains clean-up post the transition to services to AWS.
- Most of the issues arising from the Uplift project for the various web properties (e.g. Marketplace, Destination Guide, etc), appear to have been resolved, although the destination Guide still has a couple of issues to be fully resolved.
- Once this has been completed, work will resume on sorting through the web “to do”list (which includes incoming bug reports and feature requests in readiness to start working through items.
- There have been some additional non-user visible updates to some web properties.
- As of the end of December 2020, there were three software toolsets LL use in relation Second life (none of them user-facing) awaiting a transition to AWS, as of the start of February, one of these has yet to be transitioned.
Single Sign-On
- Linden Lab is starting to roll-out single sign-on for web properties (not to be confused with two-factor authentication, which is still being planned, but is not ready for deployment).
- This will mean that users with multiple accounts will only be able to sign-in to different properties on a per account basis.
- There will be a formal LL blog post to explain this further in due course.
Mobile Client
- Linden Lab is dealing with some bugs, so no significant news arising from the past month.
Last Names
- The Lab is hoping to have a new batch of Last Names available for around Valentine’s Day, which will include Valentine’s-themed last names.
- There is some talk of also providing “normal” last names (for some definition of “normal”, given the likes of “Aphelion”, “Birdwhistle”, “Dankworth”, “Izzard” and “Posey”, among many others are all considered “normal” where I come from!).
- For new batches of Last Names, LL tend to select from the list of suggestions that came about from the 2019 Last Names competition, then add a mix of names they’ve selected.
- It is also hoped that Last Name updates will happen more “regularly” in the future.
In Brief
- There has been intermittent delays in getting items delivered from the Marketplace ( which can last up to several minutes) over the last week(ish). The issue has been hard for LL to reproduce, although they have been aware of it and had tried to make adjustments.
- BUG-229713 “Marketplace listing status updates are not being updated between the web and the viewer” and BUG-230107 “Marketplace Listings window in the viewer does not update” have been confirmed by LL as an issue, and the issue is to be investigated.
- Profile feed: there had been a series of issues of late (images failing to upload, posts failing to appear, etc.), but as of February 2nd, these should have been resolved. Anyone still experiencing problems should contact support / raise a bug report.
- LL are continuing to consider how to improve the new user experience, and have been seeking feedback on what established users see as the “main” problem new users face. In addition, it was notes that in order to better understand new user problems when on-boarding, the Lab:
- Has regular internal workshops where staff go through various aspects of being a new users (e.g.building an entire mesh-based avatar from scratch) to better understand the complexities lies, and where particular pain point might be.
- Has staff spend time within new user environments (the learning / social islands, etc.)..
- Has some of the user-led mentor groups to assist with the on-boarding process through the social and learning islands.
Next Meeting
- Wednesday, March 3rd, 14:00 SLT.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 