Category: Web User Group

October 2025 SL Web User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

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:
  • 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.

September 2025 SL Web User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

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:
  • 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.

August 2025 SL Web User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

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:
  • 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.

July 2025 SL Web User Group

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday July 2nd, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript.

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.

General Work in Progress

  •  Still making progress on marketplace responsive work, mostly focused on search.
  • Doing some updates on technical upgrades to critical internal services.
  • Investigations into the current marketplace page response delays.

General Discussion

The meeting revolved around a number of questions asked of attendees.

  • Complete avatars – a series of questions on the subject of complete avatars (as defined by the Marketplace category): How how many of merchants have sold a complete avatars on the Marketplace or CasperVend; do merchants have a higher rate of complaint regarding full avatar sales compared to other items they might sell; did anyone at the meeting use a complete avatar.
    • Given the lack of merchants at the meeting, the first two questions were largely moot.
    • Some at the meeting did indicate they have used complete avatars, but feedback was somewhat limited.
  • A general discussion on very first purchases made in Second Life – for the oldbies in the group, hair was genrrally one of the first purchases.
  • A discussion around a feature request to add a dynamic map to the viewer log-in splash screen. Responses were mixed.
    • Some saw it as an import means of communicating “how vast” Second Life is to new users.
    • Others (myself included) saw it as potentially being confusing / meaningless to new users – as per the the comment on the feature request by Bavid Dailey. How big Second Life is a minor aspect of the platform when compared to providing people with a means to get to the places they want to be (e.g. via in-world portals, by LMs). In all likelihood; new users will barely grasp the concept of a SLurl or how to enter it with the correct format in the (already available) Location field – ergo, adding a scrolling map on the splash screen adds very little to their experience.
    • There is also the question of technical complexity of implementing a scrolling map within the viewer that is up-to-date with the current state of the grid.
  •  A short discussion on how easy / difficult it is to get people engaged in Second Life, and what is required to help get them engaged.
    • Some responses came down to the simplistic (and not necessarily accurate) “single-point” requirement for engagement (e.g. better in-world building tools – while definitely a good-to-have, such tools are still only one aspect of engagement).
    • Others came down to finding the right way to approach people about Second Life (e.g. in my case, by aligning SL to the interests friends have).
    • More broadly, comments encompassed the patience required to understand the complexities of the viewer and Second Life; the perception of Second Life held by people outside of SL (or were once engaged and departed) that the platform is “old”, “dated”, etc., in comparison to modern games.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, August 6th, 2025.

June 2025 SL Web User Group MP, Zero and a general discussion

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby
The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday June 4th, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript.

A video of the meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy, is embedded at the end of this summary, with sections of this summary times stamped to the relevant points in the video for those wishing to refer to the audio. My thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

 Table of Contents

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.

General Work in Progress

[Video: 1:51-7:18]

  • Marketplace: work is continuing on making the Marketplace more responsive, both with product listings and with using Marketplace search options & the category responses.
  • Downloads page:
    • Work is being put into adding further language translations.
    • The current drop-down for viewer system requirements is going to be updated to point to the main system requirements page, rather than being a separate listing.
    • The addition of Firestorm buttons to the page, and there are no plans at presents to do the same for other TPVs.
      • The reason given for this the volume of users running Firestorm compared to other TPVs.
      • The flipside to this is that including Firestorm on the official download page both gives the impression of “official endorsement” of Firestorm & further funnels users towards that TPV over others.
  • Project Zero: updates are being made to make it easier for people who still have time available on their Project Zero use to get back to their session (also see below).
  • Work that had been going into the back-end infrastructure is now nearing completion, and should free-up resources.
  • SL Wiki:
    • As noted at the SUG meeting, LL are planning to move away from using the mediawiki platform for the SL Wiki to a new service.
    • Some SL Wiki pages have been ported to Readme.com as a test, but no formal decision as to which platform will be used has been made.

Project Zero (SL  in a Browser) Update

[Video: 8:26-10:44]

  • The URL for Zero will be changing to web.secondlife.com.
  • The current page link for Project Zero at the top of the secondlife.com dashboard page is to be replaced by an actual button.
  • The link to Firestorm Zero has been removed.
  • General web page design improvements.
  • Largely non-visible changes to the join flow for incoming users.

General Discussion

Please refer to the video for details on the following.

  • [Video: 12:11-17:09] A discussion on the CasperVend Sales and Coupons options – who uses them and how.
    • Those at the meeting indicated they tend to use both in several ways (e.g. as a means of providing a discount; as a means include a shared item that is bundled across multiple products;  for event sales; for individual item sales in-store, etc.).
    • It was suggested that LL contact the Mainstore Release Discord group to gain broader feedback.
  • [Video 17:36-28:15 – text] Marketplace unavailability: a comments was made about the Marketplace reporting to be “under heavy load” and thus inaccessible to users.
    • This appears to have been the result of the same kind of DDOS / aggressive and improper crawler bots issue has has been affecting the SL Wiki, and steps are being put in place to prevent it recurring.
  • [Video: 28:24-32:10] SL Wiki: syntax highlight is broken (see: [⚠️ URGENT] SL Wiki: syntax highlight is broken *and* in-world access via viewer is down…). This impacts most pages with function pages with example code.
    • This was apparently the result of an update to the version of MediaWiki LL are running, and fixes are in progress.
  • [Video: 32:17-39:51] A questions was asked on why the main image on a Marketplace listing no longer “zooms” when clicked , and why is there are large amount of whitespace between the image and the options on the right side of the listing page.
    • Juniper Linden indicated that previously, the main image was a modal view of the original image uploaded by the merchant, and the “zoom” was simply displaying it at its original size; now the image is displayed directly within it listing at its original size.
    • The image upload size limitation is still, but the hope is to eventually remove it, and simply have a zoom for very large images.
  • General comments on:
  • [Video:54:51-end] A general question: if people had a single poker chip per year to get something in SL fixed, what would they place it on? Responses included: Secondlife.com dashboard refresh; conversations floater overhaul; shape keys; a complete fix for animation constraints.
  • Overlapping with the above were comments on the state of the Events listings (particularly people posting one event multiple times and how to report them), with and agreement from Kali Linden that it is a mess, and could really do with a ground-up rebuild (resources allowing); in terms of reporting, that is to be referred back internally for feedback on the best way to do so.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025.

April 2025 SL Web User Group: Project Zero and AI on the MP

Posted on by Inara Pey
The Web User Group meeting venue, Denby
The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday April 2nd, 2025. These notes form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript.

A video of the meeting, recorded by Pantera Północy, is embedded at the end of this summary, with sections of this summary times stamped to the relevant points in the video for those wishing to refer to the audio. My thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

 Table of Contents

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.

General Updates Since last Meeting

[Video: 0:00-0:50]

  • Some clean-up of the What’s Next page – but no re-integration of the Destination Guide as yet (The DG situation is further discussed between 17:32-21:33].
  • Fixes for spaces within Map links, with more fixes for incorrect spaces in links still to come.
    • Requests were again made to be able to search maps.secondlife.com by region name, which is apparently a little harder to implement than had been thought.
  • Minor fixes to the Marketplace:
    • See Mature Content link was not working as expected.
    • Translations updates and added.

Project Zero / Firestorm Zero (SL  in a Browser) Update

[Video: 4:59-17:00]

SL Viewer Work

  • Recent work has been focused on stability and performance.
  • Work has resumed on the new viewer UI for the Project Zero SL Viewer, and the first iteration, featuring very small changes should be released “pretty soon”.

Firestorm Zero

  • A core focus has been on the Firestorm version of Zero (Firestorm Zero, launched in March), running through bugs and issues reported with that. Some issues include:
    • People purchasing time and having issues launching a session.
    • People being locked-out of Firestorm Zero after a session (or even during) – most likely as a result of Cookies being corrupted, thus requiring Cookies to be cleared from the browser & the browser restarted.
    • It’s also been suggested that using a private / incognito version of a browser works better, as this should clear all Cookies on exiting.
    • Note: I have experienced multiple “locks-outs” (one both “public” and “private” browsers – Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Brave) and have found that clearing / resetting Cookies within the browser does not work, and it requires LL to bang on things (indeed, as of this moment, I cannot access Firestorm Zero!). If you encounter the same, please file a report.

General to Both

  •  It was acknowledged there there is a degree of confusion around Project Zero and Firestorm Zero, and the fact there are differences between them:
    • Project Zero is effectively the official viewer, offered on a limited capacity basis, with the focus more towards incoming new users / returning users.
    • Firestorm Zero is the “paid” service utilising the Firestorm viewer and focused more towards current users.
  • Some aspects of this confusion might be seen in:
    • The link found at the top of the Second Life Dashboard (Launch Second Life in a Browser) will launch Firestorm Zero.
    • The fact that at the WUG meeting, people conflated issues of logging in to Project Zero which were likely due to the limited capacity / new user focus more than anything else, with a discussion on specific issues those attempting to use Firestorm Zero were experiencing.
  • As a result, Sntax Linden noted that there should be more / better differentiation between the two.
  • Shortfalls with both Zero and Firestorm Zero were (again) noted as:
    • Lack of ability to directly upload (mesh, textures, etc.) to your account.
    • Lack of ability to save snapshots, etc., to a local disk.
    • The noticeable latency in camera movement (and similar) for those more distant to the host computer running the viewer. [It has been hinted that this could be address by relocating host computers for Project Zero / Firestorm Zero in additional Amazon GameLift end-points such as Éire.]

AI Content on the Marketplace

[Video: 36:20-End]

A feedback request to Add marketplace policy regarding AI generated content sparked a request for clarification on what people would like (e.g. disclosure of the use of AI generated content / listing images; outright banning of anything related to the use of AI tools; filtering out content made purely with generative AI (as opposed to content which has been created by someone and which happens to use some AI elements), something in-between; limiting some forms of AI content, etc.).

  • Within the meeting, disclosure (e.g. clearly indicating a item uses AI generated content / the listing images are AI generated, etc.), was preferred by most.
    • It was noted that using purely AI-generated images (e.g. created using Midjourney) as a non-representative means to promote / sell content on the MP is already against policy (misleading advertising) and so can currently be reported.
    • Kali Linden indicated LL are looking to add reasons for flagging content, and something along the lines of “violates LL policy” might be considered, to make such reporting easier.
  • It was acknowledged that those using generative AI tools (e.g. Meshy) for content on the MP probably are not going to self-identify through marking check-boxes etc.
  • It was also noted that some people using generative AI images for advertising on the MP are not doing so with intent – but rather because it is the New Shiny for them to play with, and so some allowance should be made for this.
  • There’s also the issue with people who may take images of their creations and then heavily post-process them to the point where they are no longer fully representative of the item it promotes – so what should be done in these cases? Or with those using art pulled from the physical world?
  • Part of this conversation inevitably rolled over the idea of AI “companions” / bots and an expressed desire to “ban everything” about AI – including bots, despite there being nuances – such as with the latter (e.g. in-store CSRs, more dynamic role-play NPCs, etc.).

In Brief

Please refer to the video for details on the following.

  • [Video: 1:32-4:44] General discussion on the Second Life booth at the 2025 Games Developer Conference, which some at the meeting felt to be underwhelming based on the photographs posted to social media, etc.
    • LL also appear to have received feedback from the SL creators who attended the event, and it appears lessons are being learnt for future possible events / appearances.
  • [Video 17:32-18:50] Further  discussion over the lack of a visible-by-default chat bar in the official viewer.
  • [Video: 22:03-35:15] Discussion on use of the in-viewer browser vs. using an external browser – most preferred the external browser option.
    • However, most browser-based shopping stats the Lab has for the Marketplace point to the viewer’s internal browser being primarily used for purchases.
    • Sntax Linden noted that as the internal browser is the only option for accessing the web from within Project Zero / Firestorm Zero, LL do want to improve on it – such as making the responsive MP not only work on small device screens, but also work better within the in-viewer browser.
    • Traditionally, the in-viewer browser has been avoided due to concerns of general security (e.g. clicking on phishing links and opening them within the in-viewer browser). This led to a discussion on ways to block “bad links”.

Next Meeting

  • Wednesday, June 4th, 2025.