Category: Web User Group

2018 SL UG updates #1/3: Web User Group and viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey
Grumpity and Alexa Linden host the Web User Group meetings on alternate Fridays at Alexa’s barn.

The majority of these notes are taken from the Web User Group meeting held on Friday, December 8th, 2017. These meetings are generally held on alternate Fridays, and chaired by Alexa and Grumpity Linden at Alexa’s barn. The focus is the Lab’s web properties, which include the Second Life website (including the blogs, Destination Guide, Maps, Search, the Knowledge base, etc.), Place Pages, Landing Pages (and join flow for sign-ups), the Marketplace, and so on and the Lab’s own website at lindenlab.com.

Not all of these topics will be discussed at every meeting, however, the intention within the group is to gain feedback on the web properties, pain points, etc., and as such is very much led by comments and input from those attending. Along with this are two points of note:

  • Specific bugs within any web property  – be it Marketplace, forums, Place Pages or anything else), or any specific feature request for a web property should be made via the Second Life JIRA.
  • Alex Linden provides routine updates on the Lab’s SL-facing web properties as and when appropriate, which can be found in the Second Life Web thread.
  • Note that the SL forums are not covered by the Web User Group, as the management of functionality of the forums falls under the remit of the Support Team.

Web Single Sign-On

Single sign-on (SSO) should have been implemented for most of the Lab’s web properties (e.g. sign on to your account dashboard and then visit the Marketplace using the same browser, and you should be automatically logged in there) – although there are some properties (such as the JIRA and the land auctions domain) which are not currently part of the SSO process. However, there seem to be inconsistencies in how it is working, with some reporting that:

  • If the log into their dashboard, they can access the Marketplace via the Shopping link OK, but if they attempt to use the Marketplace via a separate tab, they sometimes have to log-in again, or
  • They also have to sign-in to different properties when opening them in new tabs, even if already signed-in elsewhere.

Having very restrictive cookie settings could cause problems with SSO. There may be a specific order of log-in that is required for it to work, which the Lab will check. Otherwise those experiencing such problems are asked to write-up a details JIRA on the problems they are experiencing, and the domains where SSO appears to be failing.

Governance, Legal, Finance and Technical

Often at user-group meetings questions are asked around matters of governance or which may be related to legal / financial issues (e.g. fraud or alleged cases of fraud). All of these matters are overseen by teams outside of the technical personnel who attend the in-world meetings, and so  – while it may be frustrating for those raising the questions – cannot comment on or address such issues.

Marketplace

  • Blank folder names in listings: see BUG-9984 – this is still occurring, and the JIRA has been re-opened for comment, with a request that specific recent instances of the problem are reported (you may need to send an email to LetMeIn@lindenlab.com & request access to comment.
  • Variants in listings: this is a long-standing request – to allow things like colour variants of an item in a single Marketplace listing, rather than having to list the variants individually. This is something the Lab wants to address, although it is not on the short-term list of work they will be tackling, nor is it necessarily an easy thing to implement, but it is climbing slowing up the list.

  • Marketplace Demos: demos are a pain point for some users of the MP, in that they cannot be easily filtered out of searches, even when using boolean parameters. various ideas have been put forward over the years for better handling of searches / excluding demo items. However, most are difficult to implement successfully, simply because of the way the system can be gamed (e.g., boolean exclusion of “demo” can be currently gamed by people listing items as “d_emo” or similar). The Lab is aware of the pain points with demos and free item listings, but again, this are things which have yet to rise to the top of the list of improvements they would like to make to the Marketplace.

Feature Requests

Feature requests – raised via the Second Life JIRA – are the best way of bringing ideas to the Lab’s attention. These are reviewed an assessed (triaged) on a weekly basis. When raising a feature request, remember to state a clear user case: what the issue being addressed is, why it matters, how your idea improves things, an indication (the more detailed the batter) of how the idea can be implemented, and so on. If you’re proposing a UI improvement, then consider including mock-up images of whatever you are proposing; if it is possible to illustrate the idea clearly some other way, do that, and provide an explanation. Try to be as clear and direct as possible.

Place Pages

The Lab continues to tweak and improve Second Life Place Pages, the most recent addition being to the seach option, which now titles thumbnail images and descriptions of places matching the search criteria.

Place Pages search now titles results with thumbnails and descriptions

Other Items

  • The wiki search is currently broken: this is a known issue at the Lab and is being actively investigated.
  • Inventory & load times: The Lab hopes to do further work on inventory, looking to improve things like load times and overall inventory robustness. This work will initially focus on fixing some bugs and deprecating various old UDP messaging, mostly likely sooner in the year than later, before moving on to hopefully making it more performant.
  • Aditi inventory syncing: there is still an issue with synchronising Aditi (the beta grid) inventories with main grid inventories. The latest issues occurred just before Christmas and are still being investigated.
  • Re-activating old accounts: if yo have a Basic account you have not used in a number of years and wish to activate it, it is possible that its associated inventory has been place in what the Lab call “cold storage”, and could subsequently exhibit continued slow response times. If the account is to be regularly use, a request can be made to support to have the associated inventory for the account moved – although this must be done at a time when you are not using the account.
  • Keeping abreast of web property updates: Alexa Linden routinely posts updates on various SL web properties on the forums, where they can be seen and commented on.

SL  Viewer

On Thursday, January 4th, the Nalewka Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 5.0.10.330148. On Wednesday, January 3rd, the follow two viewers were updated:

The rest of the viewer pipeline remains as:

November 2017: Web User Group, SL viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey
Grumpity and Alexa Linden host the Web User Group meetings on alternate Fridays at Alexa’s barn

The majority of these notes are taken from the Web User Group meeting held on Friday, November 10th, 2017. These meetings are generally held on alternate Fridays, and chaired by Alexa and Grumpity Linden at Alexa’s barn. The focus is the Lab’s web properties, which include the Second Life website (including the blogs, Destination Guide, Maps, Search, the Knowledge base, etc.), Place Pages, Landing Pages (and join flow for sign-ups), the Marketplace, and so on and the Lab’s own website at lindenlab.com.

Not all of these topics will be discussed at every meeting, however, the intention within the group is to gain feedback on the web properties, pain points, etc., and as such is very much led by comments and input from those attending. Along with this are two points of note:

  • Specific bugs within any web property  – be it Marketplace, forums Place Pages or anything else), or any specific feature request for a web property should be made via the Second Life JIRA.
  • Alex Linden provides routine updates on the Lab’s SL-facing web properties as and when appropriate, which can be found in the Second Life Web thread.

Marketplace Related

Marketplace Search

  • Search can be too broad (even with the boolean functions). for example, attempting to search by store name can bring up avatar names, many of whom do not have an active store. Addition of more refined filtering mechanisms (check boxes?) could help eliminate some of these problems. This was noted at “useful feedback”.
  • Boolean search, whilst useful, can also be limited in impact when trying to eliminate things like demos from results, although this seems to be down to the creative use of demo item descriptions to foil the use of booleans like “XXX NOT demo”, and is thus harder to overcome.

Marketplace Listings

  • Default order for listings on the Manage Listing page is date ascending (oldest to newest).  It would make more sense – particularly when creating new listings – to have the default as date descending (newest to oldest), so that the newest listings – and the ones most likely to need editing – appear at the top  / on the first page of a listing – or have the merchants preferred listing order saved. This has been a JIRA issue since 2014 – see BUG-4705. It’s now regarded as something that “should be” fixable, and has been added to internal tracking by Alexa.
  • Grouping Colour variants for items has often been requested – for example, see BUG-6424 and feature request BUG-10853. This is seen as a much harder capability to add to the MP.

Marketplace Gifting

  • Some people apparently get confused over the gifting work flow: this should be: find the item > click Add to Cart as a Gift > enter recipient’s name & a message > click Finished > go to the shopping cart icon (top right of the window) to purchase / send. However, after entering the recipient’s information, some people at clicking on the Buy Now button in error, thus purchasing the item for themselves. See also WEB-3020 and feature request WEB-3531.
  • Gifting requires recipient’s full user account name not Display Name – as the latter can default to sending a gifted item to a recipient with an account name matching the display name. Note that “Resident” should be automatically appended to any single name account entered.

Marketplace Clean-up

Another long-standing request in for some form of Marketplace clean-up. For example, there are good for say that may contravene more recent SL policy changes; there are goods for sale and unsupported because the creators have long since left Second Life; there are goods listed on the marketplace that have not sold in years, and the creators (if still active have not removed), and so on.

The problem here is how should any removal be policed? Even if a creator has departed SL, it doesn’t mean their goods are no longer being purchased? How should a time limit for force removal of non-selling goods be enforced? One year without a sale? Two? Three? More?

Clean-up is something the Lab has been struggling with and considering different approaches. There may also be possible alternatives to removal – such as more refined weightings on search capabilities, or the ability to see when an item was last updated. At the moment, Alexa and Grumpity are on a feedback mission concerning this issue, so except this subject to droll forward in future meetings.

Listing fees: once suggestion for handling the proliferation of various listing types was for listing fees to be added, potentially tied to a benefit for Premium members. This understandably caused heated debate (particularly given the January 3rd 2018 increase in fees for processing credit transactions) – with creators at the meeting divided on the matter. However, it’s important to note this was just a suggestion; it is not something the Lab is planning on introducing.

Second Life Maps

Two specific requests were made:

  • Update the map generation to properly display mesh in map tiles.
  • Fix region surrounds causing a region’s map tile to be displayed as a blank green tile.

Commenting collectively on these, Grumpity Linden said:

Maps… yeah, we’d like to do that and have several ideas for how, but none of them are easy fixes. Map tile generation is different from displaying them… and none of the ideas for fixing the generation are easy or fast.

A Note on JIRA Acceptance

This routinely comes up at Content Creation meetings and came up at the Web meeting, so is worth repeating.

Following initial triage by Linden Lab (roughly daily for bug reports, usually weekly for feature requests), the status of a JIRA may be updated to “Accepted”. However, this does not mean it will be actioned in the near future.

Depending on the nature of the JIRA, “Accepted” may result in it being prioritised and actioned in the short-term; however it may also mean it has been imported and tracked by the Lab, but held for action pending the clearance of more urgent items / ideas that necessarily need to be actioned ahead of it or it may be tracked until such time as it (or something like it) fits into a tranche of work / updates the Lab is planning to implement.

SL Viewer Updates

The SL viewer is not specifically discussed at the Web User Group, however, in keeping with my summary of recent viewer updates which generally forms a part of my SL project updates, here’s an end-of-week summary of changes.

  • The current Maintenance RC viewer updated to version 5.0.9.329795 on Wednesday, November 8th.
  • The Animesh project viewer updated to version 5.0.9.329815 on Thursday, November 9th – see here for more.

Otherwise, the SL viewer release pipelines remain as:

  • Current Release version 5.0.8.329115, dated September 22, promoted October 13 – formerly the “Moonshine” Maintenance RC.
  • Release channel cohort:
    • Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer, version 5.1.0.510354, November 2 (still dated Sept 5 on the wiki page).
    • Voice RC viewer, version 5.0.8.328552, October 20 (still dated Sept 1 on the wiki page).
  • Project viewers:
  • Obsolete platform viewer version 3.7.28.300847, dated May 8, 2015 – provided for users on Windows XP and OS X versions below 10.7.