The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday January 14th, 2025. 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.
Updates
- The past month hasn’t been very active for the web team due to the holiday season. There has been a focus on internal updates, security patching, and clean up.
- Some of the above include:
- Additional security features around marketplace to increase security and add resilience.
- Version upgrades to LL’s internal services for security upgrades.
- Upcoming security feature to nudge residents to update and verify their email address on file.
- There is also something of a focus on trying to clear-up outstanding Canny issues (so maybe this and this will get addressed?).
- There is a hope that the focus on back-end services, whilst not necessarily visible to users will this help to see the overall experience of using the Marketplace, etc., become far smoother with fewer outages, issues with people being overcharged for product listing enhancements (PLEs), etc.
- A significant push for 2026 will be “first impressions” / the new user experience -trying to further improve things so that incoming users have a generally positive experience which encourages them to keep logging-in.
In Brief
- Kali Linden departed the Lab around the end of November / beginning of December to become VP of system security at a new start-up. Many thanks to her in absentia for all her work a LL.
- As a result of this, the Lab’s web engineering are operating on a “shared ownership” basis until someone can be hired-in to fill Kali’s role.
- Kali’s departure also means that some of the planned roadmap for web properties (e.g. the Marketplace UI overhaul) are being reassessed in terms of what can / should be achieved, etc.
- There have been reports of the SL forums running “slowly” for people in the UK (and Europe?). The Forums are operated by a third-party supplier, and somewhat outside of LL’s direct control. This has been escalated to the forum vendor, but not other updates at present.
- A request was made to be able to transfer L$ amounts between accounts / to others via a user’s secondlife.com Dashboard – with suitable security in place.
- This was seen as an “interesting” idea, but would likely require some additional security – such as being tied-into MFA.
- No commitment was made towards implementing the idea at this time, because further investigation on requirements, etc., would be required.
- A suggestion was made to set a limit on how much a user directly transfer – or allowing a user to set a limit on the amount (e.g. account-to-account, rather than via a vendor or similar system) at any one time, in order to safeguard accounts against being emptied if successfully hacked. This was also seen as potentially interesting, but could be a dynamic / fluid set of rules.
- LindeX use, transaction fees, etc., came up for discussion (although perhaps better placed at the content Creation meeting, where people who routinely cash-out from SL are liable to be in attendance).
- A loose consensus at the Web meeting was that greater clarification should be given as to what can be paid for directly using L$ / the USD wallet &without incurring additional processing fees (e.g. some users apparently think they have to convert L$ to dollars in order to pay their tier, etc.).
- A clearer break down of the current transaction fees in a single place (buy for L$, credit processing for cashing-out, cost for subscribers, etc.) could perhaps be given within the Dashboard.
- A discussion on SL maps – including searching by region name, improving World Map tile resolution, enhancing the map capabilities in general, etc.
- A fair point was made that the maps are a core way of expressing the size and persistence of SL – yet the capability and the functions around it are perceived as being of little interest to LL management when it comes to prioritising updates, etc., with the focus appearing to be only on areas that directly affect commence in SL.
- Maps are a vital component in the “first impression” aspect of Second Life – if incoming users can be encouraged to understand the SL is bigger than the welcome hubs and the selected destinations beyond them – and that they can, using the maps – explore on their own / in conjunction with the Destination Guide, then there is a motivation for them to keep logging-in and to start exploring.
Next Meeting
- Wednesday, February 4th, 2026.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 