Category: Web User Group

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday January 8th, 2025. They 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 – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

Table of Contents Meeting Overview General Update Web Properties Refresh Project Zero (Viewer Streamed to a Browser) In Brief Date of Next Meeting

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), 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 Update

[Video: 0:40-3:40 and 7:36-8:20]

• Pre-Holiday Marketplace issues:
  • There were some outages and slow delivery times on the Marketplace in the run-up to the holidays.
  • Due to these problems, store holders were unable to see the view count on their Top Selling Products report, as it was not reporting correctly. This has now been corrected, and the view count is once more reporting correctly, and will not be removed from the report.
  • The underlying causes of all of these issues should now be fixed. Anyone experiencing continued problems WRT them should file a ticket.
• Decimal point values manifesting on L$ amounts: users noted that places such as the Marketplace cashier page started displaying decimal point valves on L$ amounts (e.g. L$50.98). This was not intentional, and should now be corrected. Again, anyone still seeing it should file a ticket.
• Related Items Display on MP listings: an issue with Related Items not displaying correctly on Marketplace project listings has been fixed and related items should all display correctly, even when resizing the browser window smaller.
• [Video: 7:36-8:20] Featured News Blog feed:  the Feature News blog widget on the default viewer log-in screen (“Linden News” on Firestorm) is currently broken.

• • This may also be causing Featured News failing to display on the dashboard (which might display something like Grid Status instead).
  • LL are working to correct this problem.

Web Properties Refresh

[Video: 3:47-6:08]

• The pages at community.secondlife.com have been refreshed as a part of the overall drive to update the appearance of the various pages / sites.

• • Four page themes are offered on refreshed pages: Light Classic, Light New, Dark Classic, and Dark New (the default). These can be selected via the Themes drop-down link at the foot of refreshed pages:

• • • Issues have been reported when displaying Knowledge Base articles in the new layout (not clear if this is in general or specific to the Dark mode(s)), and LL are working to rectify these issues.
    • Again, if anyone notes specific issues with page displays in any of the themes, please file a ticket.
  • Updated, January 9th: Similar work in planned for the dashboard (secondlife.com), although at the time of writing, this has yet to be surfaced – although Sntax Linden indicated it was “very close to being deployed”. The initial Dashboard refresh has been deployed.

• Within secondlife.com, the What Next? section (top menu bar and https://secondlife.com/my/whatnext/) is also to be significantly updated, as much of it is very dated in content. However, the time frame for this surfacing is still TBD.

Project Zero (Viewer Streamed to a Browser)

[Video: 33:00-48:22]

• For background (if you need it!) see: Second Life in your browser: a new initiative from Linden Lab).
• Sntax Linden indicated that this can also be a subject for discussion at WUG meetings (he is on of those leading the work), although it may evolve into having its own user group in the future.
• Overall response appears positive, although some appear to have pain points – notably with multi-factor authentication causing problems in loading the viewer. This was thought to have been fixed, but still appears to be an issue.
• The time limit for Project Zero has now been increased to 1 hour per session (from 10 minutes).

• Reasons as to why people might not use the services (currently still free) given at the meeting included:
  • Inability to: save viewer Preferences; perform uploads; save chat IM logs, etc.
  • Lack of Firestorm support.
  • No in-built (client-side) AO for avatars.
  • Most of the above are on the roadmap – see my article in the link at the top of this section – although TPV support is dependent on TPVs being willing to engage in the project as it continues to be developed.
• There have been reports of zero.secondlife.com not working on Brave (Chrome derived browser) which were thought to have been fixed; however Brave still hangs without loading the viewer (the same is true for Gener8, Vivaldi and Epic, all of which, like Brave, are heavy on privacy browsing).
• Note that from the 48 minute point onwards, this conversation devolves in discussions on food.

In Brief

• A further discussion on https://maps.secondlife.com/ following that of the December 2024 meeting, this focused on the search function and how it arrives at its results, given they do not appear to be region / parcel based.
  • This segued into a wider discussion of map searches and sources used, accuracy of returns, preferred means of searching for places (e.g. SL search – then use the Map link in the relevant result, or use Maps (in-world or web), etc.
  • As a part of the more general search comments, it was suggested that when users have Maturity ratings set (e.g. only G or only M), search indicated that results are limited due to the set rating.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, February 5th, 2025.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday December 4th, 2024. They 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 – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

Table of Contents Meeting Overview General Update Single Sign-On Gifting Marketplace Items Second Life Web Maps General Discussion Date of Next Meeting

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), 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 Update

[Video: 1:59-3:59 and 6:18-8:45]

• Marketplace UI: work on updating the marketplace with a new user interface is described as being in the final stages of internal testing and thus “very close”.
• Second Life Dashboard (secondlife.com): this is also being updated to a new design, and there is a chance it may be deployed in the next month / during January 2025.
• Web Log-in and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): this is ongoing work to update the Second Life web log-in splash screen to a new design which will will work better on all devices, and will support MFA.
• Marketplace MFA: work is continuing on adding MFA to the Marketplace.
• Also in the works:
  • Changes to Linden Home store, adding some UI updates.
  • Updating the Second Life web maps – described as “still in early design”. Some of this work was mentioned in the November meeting – also see below.

Single Sign-On

• [Video: 5:28-5:58] The subject of single sign-on (SSO) – allowing a user to log-in with a single ID to several related but independent services (e.g. SL dashboard, the Marketplace, (possibly) the viewer, etc.), just once (and possibly with unified authentication factors) Has often bee requested  – and looked at – by the Lab. In response to SSO being raised at this meeting, Sntax Linden responded:

SO and Federated login is something we have been looking at doing in the future. The MFA on web login and marketplace will just be reusing the existing MFA we have on viewer and mobile.

Gifting Marketplace Items

[Video: 7:09-8:45 and 11:44-24:06]

• This has been discussed at past meetings. Gifting is seen as confusing for some (having the Add to Cart as Gift and Buy Now buttons so close together suggests Buy Now must be clicked when gifting); plus the Shopping Cart is often used as a means of storing things people might be interested in purchasing, but as gifting is tied to it, carts must be cleared of anything stored therein.
• As such, requests have been made for a direct means of gifting items in a manner similar to the Buy Now button (e.g. an “Gift Now”) button.
• Commenting on this,  Juniper Linden said:

We do have some updates to the gift UI coming out soon-ish; minor changes to that flow that might be better but nothing like “gift now”

• Sntax indicated the MP team will get to gifting as soon as they can.
• The basic requirement for this was seen as a simple button within listings, per above.
  • However, maintaining the ability to still add gifts to the cart as an option was also seen as useful – so having the “Gift Now” button present the current steps for gifting (enter recipient’s name + an optional message) followed by options to send the gift directly or add it to the Shopping Cart was seen as the optimal solution.
• The main pressure from the meeting was to have some form of “band-aid” solution for direct gifting, and then refine things after-the-fact. This was seen as the preferable course of action.
• This conversation also spiralled into use of legacy (user) names over Display Names and mis-gifting people.

Second Life Web Maps

[Video: 28:09-54:59]

• As noted above, LL are looking at updating the Second Life web maps (https://maps.secondlife.com/), and to this end, a series of questions were asked on the functionality they provide:
  • Do people use the web maps or just the in-viewer World Map. Probably fair to say the if a broad audience were asking, there would be a reasonable split between “viewer” and “both”.
  • Is the Create Your Own SLurl option in the viewer World Map a useful option?
  • Do people use the Destination Guide element of the web maps to find places?
  • Do people use the Search option on web maps?

• That those at the meeting assumed that these questions were focused on the viewer’s World Map (with ensuing confusion as to the Search and Destination Guide questions) is possibly indicative as to how often the web maps are directly used (although eight people at a meeting is far too small a sample from which to draw meaningful conclusions).
• Web Maps are frequently used, however – and possibly without people realising they are a map system – when clicking on SLurls included in things like blog posts, etc., in order to locate and teleport to the region / location in question.
• The above spread to a discussion on sharing SLurls and how people go about it (including the misconception that the viewer World Map does not allow for the copying / creation of SLurl, despite the large button at the bottom of the Map legend).
• A request was made for possible information to be added to the SL maps. Replies focused on the viewer World Map and included:
  • A “show rez zones” option.
  • A “show Set Home locations” option to help new users to find regions where they can set their home position.
  • Ability to find out more about  location via the map. Fore example, clicking on a location on map.scondlife.com gives a default dialogue (which LL have stated will be updated to actually reflect the region information) – having this available for regions / parcels on the viewer World Map was suggested (on a mouse-over hover?).
  • Whether or not a location is open to public teleporting  / a user’s ability to teleport (e.g.  whether there is a minimum age set for access, or access is controlled by having Payment Information on File).

General Discussion

• The last 10 minutes of the meeting focused on issues around links to outdated videos on web properties such as Where Next? the Support portal, etc., and the potential negative impact they have on new users / incoming new users.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, January 8th, 2025.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday November 6th, 2024. They 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 – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

Table of Contents Meeting Overview General Update Gifting L$0 Items on the Marketplace General Marketplace Discussion Date of Next Meeting

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), the forums.
• As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
  • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
  • In both Voice and / or 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 Update

[Video: 1:22-10:14]

• Data Feeds: a re-cap on the new from the last meeting that the issues causing the breakages to the data feeds API metrics (number of users logged-in, etc), for use by external services, have been fixed.
• Marketplace UI  / Responsiveness Updates: defined as being in the “final stages”, with changes under review and subject to on-line feedback from users.
  • It was noted that a lot of what is visible to users is just “pieces” and a lot hasn’t been released as yet, with the intention that all the work is out by the end of 2024.
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): as per the last meeting, is being extended across all of the Lab’s web properties to make them all consistent, so those opting-in to MFA will find at times that they may have to re-authenticate when accessing a wider range of Second Life web properties.
  • At the previous meeting the target for implementing this was within 4 (October – December 2024). In this meeting, less confidence was displayed that MFA would be deployed by the end of the year, and a more likely target is Q1 (January-March) 2025.
  • The reason for this appears to be competition for resources between the MFA work and another project.
• Web Properties Responsiveness and Appearance: as well as working on Marketplace responsiveness, the Web team is now looking at improving the responsiveness of other web properties, and bringing them more up to the look and feel of those web properties like the MP which have been undergoing an update.
  •  This is described as not being a large-scale overhaul of all web properties, but more an update to those which are looking particularly outdated.
  • Examples under consideration for this work include: Web log-in and Dashboard (secondlife.com), the Account pages, and the download page.
• Second Life Maps: improvements are to be made to:
  • Make web maps more usable on smaller screens, and refining the left-side Destination Guide bar so it does not intrude so much into the map display on smaller screens.
  • Ensure that when a destination in the Destination Guide on the left is clicked, the map scrolls to the destination and opens an information pop-up that provides actual information on the location, not just the “Welcome to Second Life” boilerplate, as seen below.

• “Stars” in MP product / store names: there have been complaints about the use of stars (e.g. via emojis / unicode, etc.) in the names of products / stores, which people feel are being used to give the false impression that the product / store is “star rated”. The web team is working on a means to prevent this.

Gifting L$0 Items on the Marketplace

[Video: 13:06-22:05]

• Being able to gift MP items at L$0 has been blocked for assorted reasons (trolling / griefing and the like).
• The Marketplace team is now confident that have the means to prevent this – but feedback is being sought on how gifting L$0 items should be managed.
• Ideas on the latter expressed at the meeting included:
  • Limiting the number of L$0 items which can be given in one go (one shopping cart load).
  • Make the receiving of L$0 items an opt-in for users, and whether from “friends” or “everyone”.
  • Limit the giving of L$0 items on the MP to friends only.
  • Making the receiving of L$0 items / gifts from the MP and opt-out choice.
• Feedback on this should be given via the Feedback portal.

General Marketplace Discussion

• [Video 22:34-26:30 and 30:54-34:34]  Marketplace images being distorted, notably in the Related Products section of listings  (see: this Canny report). This appears to be a clash between absolute image size and aspect ratio (the latter being quotes as 1:1 or 4:3 – when it is more 3:2). The 3:2 ratio also conflicts with viewer thumbnails being 1:1.
  • Alongside of this was a request to increase the (viewer thumbnail?) image size / aspect ratio (the latter might be subject to a Lab-raised Canny to allow the correct aspect ratio information to be stored with the textures to avoid the 1:1 default).
  • Concerning this the distorted images, Garfield Linden noted:

The fixes to images will be shipped after the next batch of fixes (which improves half of the issues with Related Items, as well as some weirdness when there is an error during product listing image upload fails) in our queue ships.

• • Preferences were also expressed for support custom image aspect ratios at upload and / or from a drop down of common aspect ratio options.
  • It was suggested that an overlay / crop tool might be provided to allow images to be suitably cropped to meet display requirements within MP listings.
• [Video: 26:34-30:30] Embedding videos in MP listings: rather than simply lining to videos on You Tube, the option to use You Tube’s Embed capability to embed videos in MP listings.
  • Seen as a good move, if it can be supported, with the suggestion that embedded videos should be restricted to a maximum length to avoid abuse (e.g. someone creating a listing and embedding an entire movie from You Tube).
  • An alternate suggestion was a video thumbnail image which, when clicked opens up the video on You Tube, etc., or within a dedicated tab / floater, if possible.
  • Embedding would be preferable to direct uploading and / or front-loading, as the latter requires LL storage and front-loading could slow down page loading responsiveness.
• [Video: 38:45-45:39] A discussion on further Marketplace categories / tagging.
• [Video: 45:56-50:09] General discussion (with interruption!) on multiple shopping carts (focus on on dedicated for gifting) and labelling the Buy Now button to indicate it means buying for yourself.

Next Meeting(s)

• Wednesday, December 4th, 2024.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday October 2nd, 2024. They 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 – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

Note: This meeting was entirely text-based.

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), the forums.
• As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
  • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
  • In both Voice and / or 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 Update

Data Feeds

[Video: 1:38-2:36]

• Updates to the Lab’s internal data warehousing infrastructure resulted in some breakages to the data feeds API providing metrics (number of users logged-in, etc), for use by external services and the count of users in regions listed in the Destination Guide.
• These breakages should now all be now be fixed.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

[Video: 2:42-3:21]

• MFA is being extended across all of the Lab’s web properties, so those opting-in to MFA will find at times that they may have to re-authenticate when accessing a wider range of Second Life web properties.
• This work is expected to surface during the October-December 2024.
• Hopefully, a blog post will be provided as this role-out goes ahead.

Marketplace and Web Properties Updates

[Video: 3:23-5:30]

• The Marketplace has been undergoing a facelift with its layout, together with other web properties.
• With the MP, the changes have been intended to make in more Mobile-friendly and making it more responsive, particularly with mobile.
• The deployment on the MP to Mobile had been referenced in the July 2024 WUG meeting, and it is hoped MP for mobile will be “totally shipped” by the end of October 2024.

• More is to be done with this, and once things are moved further along, it is likely their will be a more formal announcement on changes made and why.
• [Video: 6:33-6:56] The overall aim of the changes across all web properties is to make them all consistent in terms of look and general functionality (e.g. colours, were to find links, etc., in the header / footer areas, etc.
• There was assorted feedback provided for the MP page layout (e.g. the image sliders, the use of orange, the layout of the a user drop-down menu and use of sub-menus to display options, together with concerns over colour choices and readability for those with visual impairments.

  General Discission

• [Video: 5:33-5:59] Marketplace Variants:
  • Variants (at one time “Styles” – e.g. having multiple colour options for an item in a single listing) was again raised.
  • Despite being something stated as being in the works by Reed Linden (since departed from LL) as long a two years ago, and being reported as close to being available for release a year ago, it is once again something the Lab “want to do”.
  • Apparently, there designs for the idea, but “it’s definitely not happening this calendar year” (no surprises there), but is is noted as something “people want”.
• [Video: 9:54-10:30] Dark Mode UI:
  • “Most” web properties will move towards offering a dark mode UI, “but its going to be a while” before this reaches the Marketplace.

• [Video: 10:49-12:35]  Further Web Property Updates / Refreshes
  • As a part of the web properties refresh, both the Second Life dashboard (secondlife.com) and the associated Account pages below it will be received some TLC.
  • The Log-in and download pages for the viewer will also be receiving a more responsive, dark mode update.
  • This work is apparently targeting Q4 of 2024.
• [Video: 12:43-19:03] New user sign-up discussion – and extensive discussion on user sign-up page, including:
  • Lack of explanation around the choice of user name and its potential impact (e.g. being display in the avatar’s name tag, etc.). Which has in turn led to people using their physical world names or gibberish name in the believe that this information will not be shown and they’ll have the ability to create an alias / persona once in-world (as done with many MMOs).
  • Lack of any password confirmation field to account for mis-types when entering a password.
  • It was noted that some joining the Lab have the same issue vis: user name.
• [Video: 19:33-23:18] Marketplace Categories a discussion on potential new categories and overhauling the Categories listing. Please refer to the video.
• [Video: 23:56-37:35 and 42:38-44-35] Discussion on flagging items on the MP and on the stars + reviews:
  • Categories for flagging.
  • Ability to flag reviews that have been responded to as responded to / resolved.
  • Providing a guide for star rating (e.g. 1 = bad; 3 = perfectly OK; 5 = absolutely outstanding).
  • Providing review incentives / reminders.
  • Suggestions on (God help us) “Marketplace Influencers” based on the reviews they give.
  • Allowing reviews on the MP for items purchased in-world but available on the MP (which is under discussion at LL using CasperVend).
  • Refer to the video for more.
• [Video: 44:39-49:29] L$1 demo discussion – please refer to the video.
• [Video: 49:40-50:48] Marketplace API:
  • This has been requested a number of time.
  • LL is engaged in some design work around the idea.
  • However, due to the complexity of the Marketplace and its development history, it is not an easy task to tackle. There are also some “non-Marketplace technical hurdles” to cross as well.
• Please refer to the end of the video for the rounding-out of the above discussions of listing, demos, and categories.

Next Meeting(s)

• Wednesday, November 6th, 2024.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday July 3rd, 2024. They 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 – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

Note: This meeting was entirely text-based.

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), the forums.
• As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
  • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
  • In both Voice and / or 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.

Improvements and Updates from the Web Team Planned for the Coming Year

Marketplace on Mobile and MFA on the Marketplace

• The Marketplace will have a first release of being mobile responsive in the coming weeks (“not months”).
  • This will be rolled out slowly so some users may see it before others.
• This release will focus on making the the product listing pages and checkout page more responsive and display better at specific break points (including on mobile devices).
• Once the initial work on making the above pages more responsive has been deployed, LL will be adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) to the Marketplace
  • This will be an extension to the current MFA implementation covering secondlife.com dashboards and the viewer.
  • As with the current MFA, it will be opt-in on the Marketplace, and required on logging-in (presumably, whenever a token has expired).
  • Information on enabling MFA on the Marketplace will be made available nearer the time it will be made available.
• Alongside the MFA implementation, there will be likely be further changes to Marketplace search algorithm.
  • Once this work is deployed, LL will be looking at how it changes transactions, and receiving merchant feedback on the Feedback Portal.
• After the MFA work and search updates, work will resume on making the Marketplace more responsive / mobile device friendly.
  • This work will focus on MP search and the shopping cart.
  • However, a fully responsive Marketplace is not anticipated before the end of the year.
• In addition to the above, there will be some general quality of life updates on the MP, including things like a button to confirm clearing the shopping cart.

Additional MFA Discussion

The announcement of MFA coming to the Marketplace led to a further general discussion and exchange of ideas on the MFA implementation in general, including:

• The need for better safeguards to prevent large-scale Linden dollar movements in the event of an account being compromised.
  • Even with MFA, an account is vulnerable to being compromised and its L$ balance being access through the viewer.
  • The suggestion was made that MFA should therefore be additionally requested when attempting to move large values of L$ from an account. This was combined with the idea of the same in the event of multiple transaction above a certain level in a short amount of time.
  • Obviously, what constitutes a “large transaction” and a “short amount of time” would require consideration and be balanced against users becoming frustrated the MFA process and then opting-out (thus defeating the purpose in having it).
• This broadened into a discussion of MFA being triggered more in common with other web services: e.g. an alert being sent via e-mail if a log-in is detected from an unexpected / new device, an unrecognised location, etc., allowing the account holder to take action, if required.
• There was a further request for e-mail based authentication or SMS code-based authentication.
  • E-mail has been promised in the past, but is potentially prone to easy compromise.
  • SMS + code is not seen as insecure, and not likely to be implement, particularly given the general move away from it that is taking place.
• Kali Linden reiterated, the current plan is to enhance and expand the current MFA, not re-invent the wheel.

In Brief

• Maps.sl:
  • Garfield Linden is overhauling maps.sl as an after-hours project. His focus is on:
  • Bringing it to feature parity with Maps-in-the-viewer.
  • Making it mobile-friendly (e.g. with a search bar that floats over the map tiles, like maps.google.com).
  • If anyone has simple ideas for how it might additionally be improved etc., input to him or via the Feedback Portal.
• Changing to WUG meeting frequency (date / time):
  • The web team is looking to add ” a second web user group meet with a different time that is more accommodating for residents then our SLT time zone meeting”.
  • Noon SLT was considered (by the small number of attendees) as a preferable time.
  • Sntax Linden arbitrarily selected Tuesday, July 30th as the date for the first of these additional meetings- HOWEVER, 12:00 noon on the 30th July brings any WUG meeting directly into conflict with the Simulator User Group meeting (and there is audience cross-over between the two). As such, the date / time of any additional WUG meeting has yet to be confirmed.
  • Ironically, since the request was made for an additional meetings (initially on the basis of getting more frequent updates / input, rather than issues over the time), attendance at the WUG meetings has been in decline.

Next Meeting(s)

• Wednesday, August 7th, 2024, any alternate TBC – check the SL public calendar.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday June 5th, 2024. They 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 – my thanks as always to Pantera for recording it and making it available.

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), the forums.
• As a rule, these meetings are conducted:
  • On the first Wednesday of the month and 14:00 SLT.
  • In both Voice and / or 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.

Meeting Date and Time

[Video: 4:10-7:04]

• Following requests for an increased frequency of Web User Group meetings, the web team has been looking to move the standing meeting to a different day / time each month.
• Specifically, the day being considered is Tuesday, and the time moved from 13:00 SLT to 12:00 noon SLT.
• Insufficient numbers were present at this meeting (just 7 people, three of whom were Lab employees and one (that would be me) afk throughout the meeting!). Ergo, this idea will be raised at the July meeting.

Marketplace Updates, Testing and Ideas

[Video: 8:56-20:08]

• “Good progress” has been made on a new responsive layout for the marketplace intended to improve MP displaying on a mobile phone or if you are looking at the marketplace in the viewer at smaller breakpoints.
• The Marketplace team has just completed a “research spike” looking at Search issues and believe they have some good solutions for some of the problems user have reported, and will be looking to make updates to Search based on the results of this work.
• Some live experiments have been carried out on Search filters in response to concerns raised at past WUG meetings.
  • Specifically, the experiments focused on how filter changes might impact sales of non limited quantity items.
  • After looking at the data on marketplace for a weekend the team didn’t see much meaningful change in terms of sales or traffic for non limited quantity items.
• The team is still looking into ways to better promote the viability of original creators and their creations on marketplace. One idea is to have some form of carousel of “most popular creators” (similar to the “customers are buying now” carousel on the MP home page), listing the most popular creators in terms of sales over a given period (e.g. the past 24 hours).
  • Sntax Linden is open to suggestions via the Marketplace Board at Feedback Portal on how LL might accomplish this.
• Additional ideas for carousels on the Marketplace home page being mulled by the Lab include: “hot and new creators”; “popular items” and “hot & new items”, the idea being to help alleviate the need to use Search and result filters to find new release, new items, etc.

One of the things I would like to accomplish is better promoting creators. Being able to discover a product on the marketplace is great, but I would love more tools for creators to organically promote themselves or for shoppers to be able to find stores/creators.

– Sntax Linden

• Another area of discussion at the Lab is how a “for you” capability might be implemented down the road, correlating the sales of the most popular items selling on the MP globally with a user’s own shopping history, with it being noted that personalised relevancy is something the team would like to “tackle across the platform”.

General Discussion

[Video: 20:12-end]

• There was a general discussion on Search and how it is used to find good, creators, etc. This touched on idea around a system-generated tag cloud based on new / popular / “hot” items; better system-managed filters, etc.
• Providing a New MP category geared towards specifically for new users that would enable to them to locate items that would be interested in (e.g. Senra clothing and accessories, easy-to-unpack and use items), with an emphasis on ease-of-use (e.g. does not require in-world unpacking, the need to read a notecard or wade through lots of options, etc.
• The above touched on the core limitations of Senra – that even for new users, it requires a level of understanding of SL to make proper use of it post web-customisation during on-boarding, including:
  • What inventory is, how the system Library works.
  • How to copy items from the Library to inventory.
  • The difference between clothing layers and attachments, understanding the basic iconography they use.
  • As such broadening the knowledge base for Senra, providing information on it beyond the web-based onboarding was discussed.
• Towards the end of the meeting was a general discussion on how parcels and land might be better searched in general (e.g. allowing those with multiple parcels to group them together as a “place” entry (not to be confused with Place Pages) which can be searched, and which displays information on all the parcels.
• As these were general discussion point, rather than ideas for implementation, please refer to be video below for further information.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024.