Category: Web User Group

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday December 3rd, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

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

• Upgrades to marketplace PLE retry logic following the issues experienced in October.
• Testing and evaluating marketplace security options intended to offer grater security for merchants on the MP and users of the MP.
• Work on account security feature to prompt users to verify their emails to reduce account takeovers.
• Quality of life update: deployed a bugfix for description character counter.

In Brief

• The following question was asked by LL: If you could REMOVE a feature from Second Life’s web interface, what would it be (i.e. items viewed as annoying / low-use, not things that might be considered bugs requiring fixing)? Responses included:
  • Removal of the Download Second Life banner on the right of a user’s dashboard (under the Lindens Homes banner), on the grounds that the vast majority of SL users will likely have already downloaded and installed the viewer when accessing their dashboard.
  • The removal / update of the Events section of the dashboard.
• Requests were made regarding:
  • Providing better traffic information through the DG / Search, etc. For example: ensuring traffic numbers are more immediate rather than possibly referencing the previous 24 hours; perhaps providing more of an average metric (e.g. average number of users of a 24, 48, 72 hours or similar period, etc.), or a mix of both (e.g. users currently within a region + an average over a period of time).
  • Enabling panoramic images taken via the 360º snapshot function to be more widely used within SL web properties (e.g. such as the Destination Guide) and / or to be stored in a manner such that they can be used in the About tab of landmark / place floaters, etc.
  • SL’s web map page to support searches by region name as well as the current options.
  • Clarification on how to get edit rights to the SL Wiki – in short, due to issues of spamming text to the wiki via bots, etc., editing rights must now be requested via e-mail.
  • When better guidelines on the uploading / labelling, etc., of AI-generated content to the Marketplace might be forthcoming. This was said to be still subject to internal decision-making.
• It was pointed out that login-in tokens may not always be passed to the in-viewer web browser (e.g. someone is using the viewer and receives a link to the Destination Guide, which opens the in-viewer browser, they may still be asked to log-in to the DG website within the browser – despite effectively being logged-in to SL – rather than the in-viewer browser loading the Destination Guide main page).
• General discussions on (refer to video)
  • Translations within SL properties and the viewer UI, etc. In short:
    • A third-party service (not an AI tool) is used for translations.
    • If those fluent in a given language notice errors in translation, they can report them via the feedback portal.
    • It was noted that translation within SL can be difficult due to the number of “made-up” words / terms which might not readily be recognised as “simple” brand names or specific-to-SL-terms without a more generally translatable term.
  • The date last updated field within Marketplace listings (which currently has a bug so it might not display the correct date, which is being investigated) and for the addition of a Date Uploaded field within listings, so users have both.
    • As a side note, user Tjay Wicken provides a browser extension which adds the date uploaded and a list of tags used for the listing. For details see:
      • Tjay’s forum post on the extension.
      • Extension versions: Chrome Web Store (works with Brave, Generat8, et.), Firefox Add-ons page, and the Edge Add-ons page.
      • Github repository (including instructions).
  • Marketplace reviews, including giving a clear idea of what the star ranking means (e.g. 1= “I don’t recommend it” through to 4 = “this is good” and 5 = “this is perfect”) in order to try to clarify to merchants and consumers alike what people are indicating when they provide a star rating.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, January 7th, 2026.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday November 5th, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

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

• Upgrades to Marketplace tech stack and adding resilience to systems in the case of external outages (as happened this summer with Elastic Search).
• Further account security initiatives which will be rolling out soon, some of which should help prevent attempts at account take-overs.
• The roll-out of the “No Stipend” Premium Plus subscription. See:
  • Coming soon: New Option to Reduce the Cost of SL Premium Plus-Subscriptions – see this blog.
  • Why Premium Plus Without Stipend Might be Your Perfect Match – LL blog.
  • The launch appears to have been positively received by many users.
• Marketplace PLE blip:
  • PLEs were not charged between October 6th through October 28th inclusive, although subscriptions were still active and running. This caused a batch charge to occur on October 28th, which proved difficult for merchants.
  • If any merchants believe they were charged more than once as a result of these issues, please raise a support ticket.
  • LL is now working on adding more logging to these systems to prevent similar situations in the future.
• Quality of life updates:
  • A fix to correct viewer splash screen images being cut off.
  • A fix for a display bug were review font sizes were off.
• Under-the-hood work including:
  • Completion of the Python library upgrade for internal services.
  • A Redis upgrade which should improve shopping cart contents persistence across sessions.

General Discussion

• The question of Marketplace / CasperVend integration was once again raised. The short answer to this is:
  • Yes, the Lab would like to work on integration between Marketplace and the in-world shopping experience offered by CasperVend, but this requires working on some baseline tech and updates which have yet to be put in place.
  • The Lab is also keen to see a bi-directional unification of features between CasperVend and the Marketplace (e.g. features of CasperVend such as gift cards, better support for sales and discounts being extended to the MP, and features within the MP not found within CasperVend also being extended that way).
  • Currently there are no time frames as to when any of this work is likely to surface.
• A request was made for merchants to be able to delete “negative” or “harassing” reviews (a problematic request as best, given it could open the door to the deletion of any “negative” review a merchant takes issue with, no matter how valid the actual critique).
  • It was pointed out that there are already the means to flag genuinely harassing, etc., viewers.
  • It was also indicated that a request had been put forward to make the names of reviewers active links, allowing others users to click and see all reviews by a given individual, thus allowing them to better judge the reviewer’s objectiveness.
• The request to make Marketplace images clickable to display larger version / to zoom-in on them was again raised.
  • It was indicated that LL are considering implementing some form of image zoom capability / support for higher-resolution images on MP listings.
  • However, with the focus on quality of life improvements, bug fixes, etc., this work has yet to be prioritised.
  • This led to a further discussion on MP images encompassing their use by the visually impaired, how Amazon handles images, etc.
• Kali Linden noted another capability that is being considered is that of a “Demo / Try Before You Buy” button within MP listings. However, (and again), how this might work and when it might actually be implemented is still open to question.
• A discussion on listings & translations and sometimes listing being mis-translated, which rolled into a general discussion on the presentation of the Marketplace website (not making full use of the browser tab width), issues with people mistaking items in the Featured section on the MP homepage as “recommended” items, rather than paid advertising; new users being unable to easily differentiate between “modern” content (e.g. good mesh with (or without) PBR and older flexiprim or sculptie content or low-resolution skins etc.),  as by default, listings do not offer any indication of an item’s age (e.g. when first uploaded), etc.
• A discussion on the Second Life dashboard and possible improvements. Suggestions included:
  • Making the Friends Online and Groups lists more usable (e.g. so that Friends and Groups can actually be managed from them rather than having to go in-world to do so)
  • Displaying Group notices within a section of the dashboard.
  • Making elements such as Friends Online pop-outs in their own browser frames.
  • Updating the Blogs section with the feeds from the SL Blogger Network feeds as well as including the official blogs.
  • Implementing a dark mode for the pages in line with other SL pages / portal (e.g. the Linden Homes pages and the Land portal).
  • Providing more in the way of dynamic / updated content to encourage engagement, together with more informative communications from the Lab.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday October 1st, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

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

• Bug fixes shipped:
  • MFA login issue.
  • Marketplace ANS delete issue.
  • The Apostrophes Break SL Web Map issue has been fixed via a simulator update.
• Removal of “What’s Next” Basics in dashboard menu.
• More results should now be displayed in Destination guide searches.
• Under-the-hood work including:
  • A Python library upgrade for internal services.
  • A security review of the Lab’s JavaScript packages.
  • Clean-up of the subscriptions services to prevent double-charging of PMEs.

New Premium Plus Subscription Option

For those not aware:

• Mid-October will see the launch of Premium Plus No Stipend.
  • All of the benefits of Premium Plus without the Stipend or Signup bonus.
  •  Monthly Cost of with stipend vs. no stipend: US $29.99 vs. US $15.99.
  • Annual Cost of with stipend vs. no stipend: US $249 vs. US $143.88 (US $11.99/month billed annually).
• For details, see my blog post: Coming soon: New Option to Reduce the Cost of SL Premium Plus-Subscriptions.

Questions from the Lab

• Why do you make all your items no transfer? Are most items no transfer?
  • Most items are created No Transfer (75%-90% in estimates), although the return of Gacha might be increasing the number of transferable items.
  • No transfer is preferred for multiple reasons. Those cited included: complexities of customer support with transfer items then have been passed from one user to another; the risk of object loss if an item is set to No Copy as a result of being set to Transfer (e.g. through accidental deletion & trash purge). Most users prefer to have Copy / Modify items over Transfer (/ No Copy) / Modify items.
• What would encourage creators to make items transferrable?
  • Largely a matter of personal choice, but Transfer was not seen as a popular need.
  • The exceptions to this were seen as items specifically designed to be gifted / intended for the Gacha units & the resale market.
• How do you attract new users to your stores? Gifts? Credits? Responses included: Group gifts; store credits / discounts; sales / special offers.
• Has anyone used the new Avatar Welcome Pack? Have you made items for it?
  • Unsurprisingly, mixed opinions on the avatars in the Welcome Pack, although it was noted that as the bodies are Legacy, many creators have clothing available for them, even if the clothing is not specifically created with the starter avatars in mind.
  • Complaints were raised over the fact feet are not posable (so high heel shoes won’t work with them), and the “dead face” expressions – with reminders that the Welcome Pack avatars are just that: for getting started, before moving on to more capable store-bought avatars.
  • This lead to a discussion on what could / might be included in the Welcome Pack – such as a limited AO system from one of the dedicated AO creators, just to again help people get started and not necessarily try to work out where they need to shop or immediately diving into the MP.
• For those who have helped new users create an avatar via the Welcome Pack, what have been the common problems?
  • Feedback ran from lack of variety in the avatars (e.g. all of them are human); lack of contextual / explanatory information.
  • General feedback on bodies / heads in general was the over complexity of things and the steps a new user must go through (even after exposure to the Welcome Packs), together with easily identifying what will / won’t work with a given body type / head type if the new user is not familiar with brands, BoM, using HUDs, etc.
• How long would you say an experienced user would take to create a really good avatar?
  • Estimates varied from “5 minutes” to “an hour”, depending on approach (e.g. having the necessary avatar parts – head, body, etc.), already in inventory and working from there, vs going out and shopping for a suitable body / head, etc., vs. using the Avatar Welcome Pack.
  • It was noted that helping new users build / customise avatars takes much longer, both due to the general learning curve and the need to overcome the technical / language barriers (e.g. explaining what “BoM” is, why only certain clothing will fit certain bodies, how to recognise what is needed from multi-body pack of clothing in order to wear the outfit on the avatar, etc.).
• What would you say is the average cost of a good avatar?
  • Just for a head, body, skin, hair and initial outfit: US $50, although cost is relative depending on what is being sought.
  • This also folded itself into people’s expectations / desires for their avatar and its looks.

General Points

• Sntax Linden noted that the Avatar Picker / Customiser found in Project Zero is now offered in the official viewer, but without the dedicated Avatar toolbar button, the Picker opening within the viewer rather than as a separate browser panel.
• It was pointed out (as I’ve done previously), that the official welcome hub is out-of-step with the Avatar Welcome Pack as it only references the Senra avatars.
• The Q&A session included a wide-ranging discussion on approaches to getting new users acclimatised to SL using a mix of web options / capabilities and in-world experiences.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, November 5th, 2025.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday September 3rd, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

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.

Announcements

• The AI Character Generation beta has been spun down. See: LL announce a pause in the current SL AI character designer project for more.
• All of the original Linden Homes micro-continents have been decommissioned.
  • Remaining holders of these homes have been transitioned over to the current Linden Homes selections.
  • All of the V1 Linden Home regions have been removed from the grid and the associated Linden Home V1 web-based home control pages have been archived.

Updates

• As the August Web User Group was ending, the Marketplace the third-party Elastic Search instance experienced a significant failure, causing a very significant Marketplace outage. This caused some merchants were mistakenly charged multiple times for Product Listing Enhancements, which were all refunded.
  • If any merchant believes they are still out of balance, please open a support ticket.
  • The Marketplace team is working to stabilise the Marketplace and add more resiliency to MP systems to handle external outages.
• Various bug fixes with Marketplace Responsive Search have been released, together with various clean-up tickets around support, land, and region store
• A further tease  – without specifics – of an upcoming announcement “in the next few weeks” related to balancing-out the economy and providing more Linden Dollar sinks (see: An Update from Linden Lab – Linden Dollar Exchange Rate and the Economy – July 2025).

General Discussion

• Open question from Juniper Linden: If you could remove one feature/aspect of Marketplace, what would it be? Responses went beyond the scope of the question and included:
  • Revert the change that makes “classified” ads at the top of search returns less obvious than they used to be (e.g. re-add the border around them or highlight them).
  • Refining the best-selling items section of the Marketplace (e.g. break it into price ranges / prevent it showing items which were on a short-term offer – e.g. L$75 for a day or so, but have since reverted to their full price, etc., or resetting an item so it doesn’t appear in the Best Selling list for the week in which its listing has been altered).
  • Improved filtering for searches (e.g. by body type).
  • Filtering-out AI generated content (assuming it is properly self-reported as such within the listings, which currently isn’t possible, nor is how AI been used in a product  – for example, is the item itself created using AI tools, or only the scripts within it?).
• The default for the number of items shown on a Marketplace Page (e.g. following a search) has been altered from 96 to 48 (with the drop-down offering 24, 48 and 96 items per page options).
• The above led to a discussion on further redefining the Marketplace product categories – notably around the avatar (e.g. having an Avatar category, with sub-categories such as Body Parts, Shapes, Hair, etc.).
• Web map (maps.secondlife.com) and following-on from the August meeting:
  • The issue Web map can’t find region in URL without trailing slash appears to have been fixed.
  • The issue Apostrophes Break SL Web Map appears to be awaiting a server/simulator update to fix.
• This is a reported issue where, if you have been given the ability to see a friend on the in-world Map and can teleport to them, the teleport may fail if they are on a region with a space in its name, as the space breaks the SLurl.
• A request was made to have a web page in the nature of the Land Auctions page, but specifically for rentals, rather than relying on search / the in-world world map. This was seen as a good idea for the Lab to consider, but would need further consideration in order to fit-in to the development roadmap.
• Note: during the above question, a group of unicellular organisms attempted to disrupt the final ten minutes of the meeting. However, as the majority of the topics had been discussed, Pantera has wisely cut the attempt from the meeting video, which jumps to the closing remarks.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, October 1st, 2025.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday August 6th, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. The official video is embedded at the end of this summary.

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 Marketplace team hope to release the mobile responsive marketplace search updates in the next week or so.
  • Note this updates is only for MP search, but there will be future Mobile updates for Marketplace in due course.
• Time is being given to some general web property quality of life updates.
• Work is continuing on some technical upgrades to critical internal services, defined as “not very glamorous but help keep things running smoothly”.
• New bank pay-out options are due to be deployed “in the next week or so” for Brazil, Canada , France, Germany, Lithuania, Malaysia, the UK, the USA and Turkey.
• A reiteration on the upcoming ending of the Character Designer programme (see: LL announce a pause in the current SL AI character designer project)
• Kermit Linden will be leading Web User Group meetings for a while, and may be willing to host twice monthly meetings.
• There is a “new offering” due to be announced in the next couple of months.

General Discussion

• Several issues with maps.secondlife.com were raised, with the feedback that “some” are being worked on. Those raised were:
  • Apostrophes Break SL Web Map.
  • “Unable to locate the region” pop-up with maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/.
  • Web map can’t find region in URL without trailing slash.
• CasperVend integration: reported as “no official updates but we do want to take it on soon”.
  • Kali Linden noted that she has been working with Casper to develop product specifications for integrating some CasperTech features in to the Marketplace.
• Marketplace variants / styles (i.e. multiple option for a product (such as different colours) in a single listing: the Marketplace team has yet to “get back” to this, and the request was for people to keep asking about it.
• A request was made for a formal means for AI-generated content to be properly disclosed on MP listings. The broad response to this was content disclosure has generally been treated as being differed to the creator.
• The group was asked that if they could create one web feature in SL, what would it be? Responses included:
  • A 3D SL Map.
  • Marketplace:
    • An ability to users to see a 3D preview of assets on the Marketplace.
    • Formal inclusion of item creation date (not listing creation date) and and the date on which the item was last updated for Marketplace listings. This has actually been looked into, and a plan to offer something “more stable” for creation date is in development, but last update date requires more work.
    • Filter options for removing specific creators / stores from Marketplace searches.  This is acknowledged as being a popular request, and something the Lab wants to look into.
    • Ability to search the MP by body type. This is something that has been specified internally, and so seen as as something that could be delivered in the future.
    • Multiple Marketplace wish lists / favourite lists. Again, this has received a lot of requests and is being thought about.
    • A request for multiple stores under one account. This was seen as a nice idea, but currently hard to implement.
  • Making the Land Use Fees page more intuitive, and perhaps include a way to calculate group bonus, etc.
• The use of AI agents to assist in Marketplace searches was raised, in order to increase accuracy of results, etc.
  • There is nothing specific in the works for this.
  • Training AI tools for Marketplace search was seen as a major undertaking, simply because of the size of the MP, and that search could generally be improved a lot more directly without necessarily requiring the use of AI tools.
• A discussion on people’s favourite / least favourite things in Second Life during the past week which flowed into a general conversation – refer to the video for details.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025.