Category: Web User Group

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.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday May 1st, 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.

Marketplace Infrastructure Update

• The Marketplace infrastructure update has been completed, although the work did lead to a few “bumps” and some rapid bug fixes. However, the Marketplace team believe things should be running “just fine now”.
  • If any Merchant is experiencing issues with list / updating items, etc., then it is requested they raise a Canny report through the Feedback Portal.
• As a result of this work, the Marketplace should be a lot more responsive in terms of page loading, etc., and the work also opens the door to the Lab adding a “lot of cool features” to the MP.
• Garfield Linden noted that the focus on MP work now is making it “mobile-friendly and making improvements to Marketplace search”.

General Discussion

• Sntax Linden indicated that the request to allow people to be able to Gift items directly from the Marketplace without having the item transferred to their Shopping Cart is “high” on the list of updates for the MP, but will not be available “soon”.
• There have been multiple requests for users to be able to have more wish lists / favourites lists, both public and private. Requests to go with additional lists were also given, including:
  • Provision of sort filters added (e.g. newest first / oldest first)
  • Ability to search lists for items previously added to a list.
  • Ability to give lists custom names / create custom lists (e.g. by selecting items in another list / the Shopping Cart and use them to create a new wish / favourite list).
  • General load time improvements (for those with very large lists).
  • An ability to move items more easily between different lists (e.g. from the Shopping Cart to a favourites or wish list, or between wish lists if there are multiple lists available, etc.).
  • All of these were seen as potentially “good ideas” for improving the functionality and usability of lists within the MP.
• A further request was made for Merchants to be able to respond to poor ratings and / or purchasers to be able to message Merchants through the MP – particularly to help where people have made a purchase and are confused about something and needs a little assistance.
  • A messaging system was seen as particularly beneficial for Merchants who get their IMs capped, as it provides a further channel to track comments and requests, making it potentially easier to help provide customer service support / mitigate bad reviews that are based on misunderstandings.
  • Sntax  suggested this could be handled via a prompt / link could be added to the review option (e.g. “do you need assistance with the items? Contact me by clicking here”).
  • This suggestion was seen as potentially However, there was some opposition to making any message option that “hidden”.
  • Instead, a preference was expressed for a proper messaging system – button, form, an “inbox” for the Merchant to receive messages (rather than them going to e-mail, although this should be offered as an option), etc., – all of which would take significant resource to supply.
• The above led to a broader request to make it possible for anyone to reply to a review – so even if the creator of a product does not reply, someone who might be able to help (e.g. having gone through a similar misunderstanding) can drop an explanatory reply.
• A request was made for LL to provide more header differentiation between e-mails sent to users that are off-line Group notifications and those that are actual off-line IM from individuals, with some claiming Gmail often lumps them together after filtering (which could as much be an issue in how the Gmail filter is set-up).

 

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, June 5th, 2024.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday April 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.

This meeting was more a seeking feedback type of discussion than it was an update on web project projects, etc.

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.

Official Viewer Search

• It was noted by some users at the meeting that the official viewer takes longer to index new users so they appear within the web search People tab, whereas TPVs using the legacy search seem to index them a lot faster.
• It was similarly noted that very short user / place names (3 letters of less) don’t always show up in search results.
• It was asked why there is a L$30 fee for creating a Classified ad in a user’s profile / Search (short answer: to provide an additional search service of more “curated” locations over general search) and why such classifieds are not categorised (short answer: they are, via a pre-defined drop-down).
• There have been some reports of the viewer search constantly requesting cookies be accepted, either on every use, or the first time Search is used during a user’s current log-in session.

In Brief

• Ability for MP merchants to have their own “featured items” display pinned to the top of their store page on the first page of their MP store.
  • This idea has been floated by Sntax Linden a couple of times, and would allow Merchants to select items from their store (e.g. new items, best selling items, etc.) highlighted in some manner as featured items (possibly in a similarly distinctive manner to the Featured Items displayed on the MP home page).
  • It was met with broad approval / agreement.
• LL are still looking at the way thumbnails of products are selected for display within users’ Favourite Stores lists on the MP, with a view to making it more useful to Merchants. This might be by:
  • Displaying thumbnails of their most recent releases, so people can use the list as a quick reference to what is new in their favourite MP stores.
  • Tying the selected thumbnails to the store “featured items” capability discussed above (if implemented).
• General discussion on in-world store activity.
  • Some felt that the large volume of shopping events is having a negative impact of in-world store footfall, as people are event-focused, rather than opting to visit stores directly.
  • Some reported experiencing a steady decline in footfall within their stores, others no change / a potential increase in recent months.
  • It was pointed out that besides events, creator-merchants don’t necessarily help themselves by not updating the SLurls to their stores / items as listed on the Marketplace when they move (probably in part because there is no easy mechanism for them to do so on the MP if individual listings include SLurls).
• The above led to a broader discussion on market forces, such as the fact that content creation is now for more the purview of these wishing to do so on a full-time basis (in order to remain competitive) rather than something the “hobbyist” creator can enjoy as a means of generating revenue as a means to help support their in-world activities (land tier, etc.).
• Th question was raised as to whether CasperVend should / will be remained as it is now a LL property (just as OnRez and XStreet SL were purchased, with the latter going on to become the SL Marketplace).
  • The above included comments relating to the unfortunate / unwarranted knee-jerk reactions some users have had towards the Lab (and CasperVend users) in the wake of a certain article published within the social journalism website Medium, and which has been officially commented upon here (and, if interested, I’ve offered my tuppence worth of commentary here).
• It was asked whether people have made any attempt to use generative AI in their content creation. The broad feedback was – no. This saw a series of follow-up questions:
  • Do people think AI tools could be useful – possibly, but not far enough developed to be sure.
  • Should content produced using AI tools and sold on the MP be marked as such – yes.
  • Are there any preferred tools already in use with content creators – not really.
  • This lead to a subjective (i.e. only a handful of creators) discussing how AI tools are viewed  / currently used within SL (e.g. to generate vendor images).
• Sntax noted that feature requests made via the Feedback Portal board for the MP /Web are recorded and used to help inform and direct WUG meetings, particularly where it is felt broader / deeper feedback on ideas is required.
• A further request was made for store / brand names on within SL to be unique (as with avatar account names), to both help secure branding against copycats and also to make it easier for users to find the content they want when searching the MP.
• A suggestion that when there are Marketplace issues and updates, a mechanism is put in place to pop-up a notice when users access the MP, rather than replying purely on GridStatus (+ its outlets on Social Media), as many users aren’t even aware of the latter, whilst having notices actually on the MP means they are eyeballing them directly.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, May 1st, 2024.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday March 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.

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.

Marketplace

• The Marketing Team has been working on back end and infrastructure work to upgrade the Marketplace. The updates should be released in the coming days.
• There were some outages when deploying some updates in the past week, which resulted in issues such as ANS not appearing in Marketplace. This has been corrected, and ANS should be back and working as normal.
• Once these infrastructure updates are deployed, it clears the way for some new features and UI updates LL has been planning.
  • In terms of UI updates, LL is planning improvements to the viewing products and checking out the Marketplace via the viewer, improving the display size when the floater is changed, and moving the MP so it will display decently on mobile or tablet devices.
  • The feature updates once again have a focus on search. These will include updates based on user feedback / requests, but details of what these will be and the likely time frame for deployment is still being finalised, so details to come. However, “some updates will come faster than others” in terms of information relating to them.

General Discussion / Requests for Marketplace

• A discussion on making the shopping cart / wish list more flexible.
  • This included requests for more carts for different functions (e.g. a shopping cart specifically for holding items to be purchased as such; carts which could be used to save items for later purchase, separate to the one used for check out, etc.).
  • The latter was particularly popular, either as a cart or a “Save for Later” list (a-la Amazon).
  • Making the wish list function more robust / flexible  / visible (e.g. being able to have more than one wish list).
• The above spilled into a discussion with the Buy Now button, with some wanting it to include the ability to buy and send gifts directly, rather than having to go through the shopping cart / checkout; some wanting a better distinction between Buy Now and Buy as Gift, as they believe people hit Buy Now mistaking it for Buy as Gift.
• Both of the above will be looked into.
• Coupons and vouchers: the ability for merchants to offer coupons and voucher for use on the MP is on the roadmap, but not currently being worked on.
  •  This spilled into the idea of “affiliate” linking – e.g. a person puts together an Flickr image of a look they have created and includes links to the items on the MP – when someone clicks on any of the links and makes a purchase, the originator of the photo gets a referral fee paid to them.
• There is interest at LL in developing a “You Might Also Like” function / “Also Bought” (again a-la Amazon), wherein items similar to the one being looked at are listed or items other have frequent bought together with the item being looked at are listed (rather than the current merchant-generated “related products” list). But again, not on the current roadmap.

Marketplace Styles

• Marketplace Styles (allowing things like different colour variants for a product in a single listing) had been given as a capability LL were hoping to deploy before the end of 2022 or early 2023 (see November 2022 Web User Group: new “Plus” subscription level).
• It is has now been confirmed as something LL has “got designs for” and “would like to get to”. So, as per my January summary comment, if you are a Merchant who has been looking forward to this capability, it is probably best not to hold your breath for its arrival unless you’re especially fond of blue as a facial colour.

In Brief

• Web Search (viewer):
  • LL are considering a re-working of the current web search page presented in the viewer.
  • The current layout might become “relegated” to being an “advanced search” capability, with tabs being added to the top of the page to make searching easier (e.g. by category – People, Places, Events – rather than having to specifically uncheck or check these on a per search basis.
• It’s been noted that the use of the word “Resident” when used as part of an account name is inconsistent (e.g. in some searches / actions, only the user’s first name needed to be entered, the “resident” is automatically appended; in others “resident” must be explicitly typed in as a part of the name. LL would like to address this, but no work going forward at present.
• A discussion on L$1 items, gifting and a “biasing” of top selling item lists., and the idea of limited L$0 items being gifted only to friends of the person using the item as a gift.
• Further requests to make demo(s) a dedicated category on the MP, or to make a Demo checkbox within listing creation to ensure the metadata indicates an item is a demo, this improving searches wishing to include / exclude demo items without having to rely on keywords.
• A general conversation on the MP and merchant’s perceptions on how people use the Marketplace.
• A suggestion to have a Marketplace button in the Profile floater for merchants who have a Marketplace presence – or configurable buttons that people can use to point to their MP store, their Flickr presence, etc. This led to a discussion on Profiles.
• The WUG meetings are “very close” to becoming biweekly.
• Note: the video extends beyond the end of the meeting. As this is use chat, rather than specific put to LL, it is not summarised here – please refer to the video.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday January 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.

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.

Marketplace

The meeting started with an apology for the issue over the New Year period which included items merchants were trying to list failing to appear, items and stores failing to show up in search results (see BUG-234924). The Lab believe the causes of the issues have been fixed, and processes have been put in place for the back-end systems to better alert support / engineering when issues of this nature occur.

A request was also made for any merchants still experiencing problems in trying to list items or in having their items / stores show up in searches, to file a Jira with LL.

The above was followed by a meeting-length discussion with what are seen as getting to be long-term terms issues with the MP, some of which are the results of changes which have inadvertently given rise to opportunities for the Marketplace to be gamed, and merchants losing revenue as a result. Key among the complaints being made were (but not limited to):

• Active stores seeming to vanish from the Marketplace entirely.
• Listed items failing to show up in any searches.
• Exploits such as items being falsely labelled in the Product title field producing misleading search results.
• Exploits being opened as a result of the 2022/23 overhaul of ElasticSearch (the engine powering MP searches), and relevancy weightings being given to product titles .
• Exploits allowing spamming through the features tab which further influences search results in favour of those doing the spamming.

It was noted that these issues – including the problems of items and stores not appearing in searches – go back over several months (rather the the issue witnessed over the new year period being a “one off”), and they are giving rises to across-the-board upset and frustration among MP merchants, and with their customers.

The conversation was very much one in which people spelled out the issues being experienced, whilst Lab representatives at the meeting mostly listened and took notes. This being the case, and rather than risk parsing the meeting through my own subjective presence as someone who is not a merchant, I will refer readers to the video of the meeting as embedded below, and encourage anyone experiencing any of the issues raised to file a Jira bug report with Linden Lab on the matter.

Marketplace Styles

• Part of the above discussion touched on Marketplace Styles (allowing things like different colour variants for a product in a single listing).
• This was promised as being an active project throughout 2022, with (the since departed) Reed Linden stating in November 2022 (see November 2022 Web User Group: new “Plus” subscription level) the capability could appear before the end of that year or in 2023.
• As more than a year has passed without mention, I raised the topic at the end of the meeting, requesting the actual status of the work (particularly as when it was raised in 2023, not long after Sntax Linden has taken over the WUG meetings, he did not appear to be aware of the project). The response was:

Styles is at the top of my list for things for MP. Just need to find the right time to slot it in. I can’t promise when but I am hopeful we can make headway on it this year. 

– Sntax Linden

• Which probably means that if you are a Merchant who has been looking forward to this capability, probably best not to hold your breath for its arrival. Unless you’re especially fond of blue.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, March 6th, 2024.