Category: Web User Group

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday August 2nd, 2023. They form a summary of the items discussed and is not intended to be a full transcript. A video of the entire meeting is embedded at the end of the article for those wishing to review the meeting in full – my thanks to Pantera for recording it.

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.
• They 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

Re-Indexing for Listings Issue

• An issue was discovered with MP product listings not showing up in search results or for store owners using their Manage Listing pages (although the product listing could be reached directly by entering its name).
• This was traced to the items failing to be indexed correctly by the Marketplace service.
• As a result, LL initiated a complete re-indexing of the MP at the start of week #31, and while it took time to complete, the issue should now be resolved and all product listing should be showing correctly via search, etc.
• Those still encountering issues with their products should raise a Jira.

General

• Best selling items ordering: when used within a specific MP store, this will in the near future order items according to how well they have been selling in comparison to the rest of the items in the store over the past 30 days, to better reflect current sales.
• “Do Not Show Limited Quantities” in Search:
  • There have been requests to either have this option (shown in product search results at the foot of the left-side column along with Demos) enabled by default or limited quantity items should not be shown in Search results.
  • This has been requested primarily due to the issue of (new) users buying ex-gacha items without realising that are not buying from the original creator.
  • Given there are legitimate reasons for Limited Quantity items to be listed on the MP, excluding them from Search would be potentially  discriminatory.
  • Preferable solutions suggested were:
    • Retain the option and either reverse it – so it has to be enabled to include limited quantity items OR have whichever way the toggle is set stored within the user’s MP cookies, rather than the check box having to be be set against every search.
    • Add a further checkbox to specifically eliminate (or include, depending on the default setting) Gacha items from / with Search results.
    • LL implement a new product category – Limited Quantity – specifically for such products / items – although how well this would work is open to question, given there is a Gacha category which does not prevent those types of limited quantity items pitching up in Search results.
• The above spread to a broader discussion on creators using unicode characters and punctuation symbols in their store names which actually makes it harder for them to show up in search results under the Merchants / Stores tab, unless a precise full or partial copy of their brand name is entered.
• Listing Enhancement metrics: a request was made for those paying for Listing Enhancements to receive metrics (e.g. no. of times displayed, number of click-throughs generated, number of sales from click-throughs).
• Product reviews:
  • A suggestion that LL should allow reviewers to just leave star ratings against items listed on the MP, as used to be the case with SL Exchange and is the case with Amazon.
  • A request for the MP to be open to reviews by those who have purchased a product in-world (and who may have used the MP as a form of catalogue to seek out items they then purchase in-world).
  • The ability to view an individual’s review history on the MP – allowing their fairness / bias to be better judged.
  • See also feature requests BUG-233138 “Social/Creator Focused Marketplace Feed” and BUG-233139 “A user-run first-line Moderation Tool”.
• General discussions on:
  • The use of Favourites List and Wishlist options (e.g. Favourites List – as a means of quickly pulling up preferred brands and checking for new releases, requests for multiple Wishlists, etc., making lists more easily shareable other than by direct URL, etc.).
  • Preferred general Search results ordering (e.g. newest first or best selling).

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, September 6th, 2023.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, July 5th, 2023.

WUG meetings:

• Are held in-world, generally on the first Wednesday of the month – see the SL public calendar.
• Cover Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
• They are not intended for the discussion of Governance issues, land fees / issues, content creation & tools, viewer or simulator development / projects. Please refer to the SL calendar for information on available meetings for these topics.

A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and subject timestamps to the relevant points in the video are provided. Again, the following is a summary of key topics / discussions, not a full transcript of everything mentioned.

This was not the “usual” for of meeting – little was said by way of web updates, etc., which have occurred since the last meeting and no updates on upcoming projects.

In Brief

• A general discussion on how Flickr is used in relation to the Marketplace: creators using it to promote new products and / or encourage interest in their brands / as an alternative to using in-world Groups, etc., through photo competitions, giveaways, etc; fashion bloggers using it as a means to micro-blog about clothing, hair accessories, etc .; users being able to flow merchants and see images / videos of new releases directly on their Flickr feed, etc.
  • Not sure on the purpose of the question (from the Lab), and no-one asked in the meeting.
• A request for people who would like to see ONE thing WRT SL web properties and services (preferably). Responses include:
  • Allowing multiple versions of items (e.g. different colours) within a single listing (as has been LOOONNG promised with the Marketplace Styles function, but has yet to actually surface); or to have different versions of an item to be individually listed, but have buttons  within their listings so that users can easily toggle between the, a-la Amazon (e.g. so if an item is offered in say, single, twin, triple and quadruple sets, the various sets (and their prices) appear as a button on one another’s listing page so that users can swap back and forth between them).
  • The ability to remove certain stores / items from Search results (e.g. search for “cars” and have an option to select “don’t show me products from this creator again”, and having further results from that creator removed / excluded from search results).
  • The ability to click on reviewers’ names and see a full list of all their reviews (allowing for better judgement of their bias, etc.).
  • The ability to contact sellers directly through the MP.
  • Having fields which state when an item was listed / last updated on the MP.
• How does Search order results? It varies, but as a rule of thumb:
  • “First time” searches & general searches from the MP home page, should show results by relevance.
  • “First time” searches of stores should list in terms of newest first.
  • If an option to display search results has been previously selected from the drop-down, that is generally the option use to order the results of further searches (until changed).
• A lot of discussion on the pros and cons of “brand tagging” listings + identifying folders in Inventory.
• Very much a meeting where it is easiest to watch the video (enable closed caption if required).

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, August 2nd, 2023.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2023.

WUG meetings:

• Are held in-world, generally on the first Wednesday of the month – see the SL public calendar.
• Cover Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
• They are not intended for the discussion of Governance issues, land fees / issues, content creation & tools, viewer or simulator development / projects. Please refer to the SL calendar for information on available meetings for these topics.

A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and subject timestamps to the relevant points in the video are provided. Again, the following is a summary of key topics / discussions, not a full transcript of everything mentioned.

Marketplace

• Mentioned towards the end of a blog post made on April 7th relating to (then) recent updates, the change to allow best selling to now index each merchant’s store individually instead of just the top 50k items is now being actively worked on.
  • When complete, it will allow customers to sort the listings within a store by those which have been the top selling over a certain period of time (exact period still TBD at the time of writing).
  • In addition, Sntax Linden is interested in taking feedback from merchants on idea they may have for best selling items indexing / lists.
• Also raised at the April meeting was the subject of a Marketplace “Spring Clean” (last performed in 2019).
  • This will see the unlisting of products and/or disabling of merchant stores if they meet specific criteria (as defined in the blog posted linked-to above).
  • Note that products / stores can be re-activated by the Merchant logging-in and re-activating and re-listed.
• The “Spring Cleaning” discussion included a number of suggestions / comments, including providing  listings with an indicator to show if the merchant had logged in to MP in the last X number of days, so that customers might have some idea as to how active the merchant is, should support be required (privacy concerns were raised over this idea).

In Brief

Please refer to the video for these topics.

• The Spring Cleaning topic led to a broader discussion on preserving content which might be regarded as “historic” (with the creator’s approval) when the creator departs Second Life.
  • This is not necessarily something restricted to saving within the Marketplace.
  • There is already the Second Life Region Preservation Society which can take entire regions into LL’s stewardship when certain criteria can be met).
  • However preserving individual products / product lines raises issues of IP which could be more complicated than with the preservations of a region, and with issues of continued support (or the expectation thereof) should the product(s) also continue to be in use within SL.
• Questions were asked about shopping practices and how often people use the MP shopping cart to store-up items for later purchase, rather than proceeding to the checkout with a cart when they’ve finished their current round of shopping.
  • Responses to this were many and varied (e.g. “because I don’t want to make any MP purchases until I’m in-world to receive / unpack / sort them”), through to comments about lack of wishlist functionality (e.g. they remain cumbersome to use / load slowly / the link to add items to a wishlist is not obvious, etc.).
•  In terms of wishlists, the option for multiple / custom wishlists was again raised, and noted that it is on the MP roadmap, but currently under the heading of “someday”, rather than something that is actively being worked on or considered for implementation at this point in time.
• A general discussion on how merchants promote new products – via Groups, Twitter, Discord, word-of-mouth, etc.
  • One suggestion was to allow customers the ability to “follow” their favourite stores (see feature request
  • BUG-233138 “Social/Creator Focused Marketplace Feed”), allowing them to receive / view information on new releases from those stores when visiting the MP.
  • Whilst reactive rather than proactive, it was also pointed out that the above could be done when a customer goes to their Favourite Stores listing on the MP and then order by Age: Newest First.

• The above led to the suggestion that people could have their own personalised MP home page, listing favourite stores, providing updates on the releases etc.
• Dates for listings – date listed, date last updated, last date the item sold, for example – have been requested in the past and were requested again, together with indications on whether products are using  the latest / more recent SL capabilities, if relevant (e.g. Bento, PBR (once in general use), etc). However, trying to cover everything likely become overly complicated.
• The idea of “verified” creators was also raised: although exactly what the criteria for this should be might be seen as subjective, or the process itself might be seen as a barrier to entry )were it, for example, involve LL requesting personal information beyond that already requested).
• Plrease refer to the second half of the video for these and other general discussions.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, July 5th, 2023 (according to the public calendar – check for changes). Venue and time per top of this summary.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, April 5th, 2023.

WUG meetings:

• Are held in-world, generally on the first Wednesday of the month – see the SL public calendar.
• Cover Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
• They are not intended for the discussion of Governance issues, land fees / issues, content creation & tools, viewer or simulator development / projects. Please refer to the SL calendar for information on available meetings for these topics.

A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and subject timestamps to the relevant points in the video are provided. Again, the following is a summary of key topics / discussions, not a full transcript of everything mentioned.

Marketplace

Recent Updates and General Notes

• There have been changes made to Marketplace Search. For example:
  • Now, by default (and assuming no search terms have been entered), displaying a merchant’s store page will list their products by newest first).
  • Merchant and Store names are no longer included in the Product search, but are now apply considered when using the dedicated search tab.
• Some of these updates have caused confusion, so an official blog post has been published to explain them and the reasoning behind them.
• These changes, and those noted below, are being actively monitored by LL, and further adjustments may be made based on the metrics they are seeing / feedback from Merchants / consumers.
• In addition:
  • The checkout cart has been updated to allow up to 99 list items to be stored in it (the previous limit was 10).
  • The cap on the total number of search returns, implemented with the last set of Search updates (a total of 50 pages of results) has been rolled back, so that Search will now list all results matching a given search.
• Unless Boolean, etc., operators are used in entering search terms, Search will now attempt to string together words entered into it and search based on the string (e.g. so whereas entering “blue shirt” would previously have listed items matching “blue” or “shirt”, it will now attempt to limit results to results which have “blue” and “shirt” in their descriptions.

Upcoming Changes

• “Marketplace spring cleaning” is about to start.
  • This means that if a merchant has not logged-in to the MP for two years, and they have listings which have not seen any sales in the part year, those items will be unlisted.
  • Similarly, if the Merchant has not logged-in in two years and nothing has been sold through their MP store in the past year, the entire store will be unlisted.
  • This work will be blogged about by the Lab as the work starts.
• E-mail verification: thus far, e-mail verification has not been a requirement for Merchants to use the Marketplace. This will be changing so that e-mail verification will be a requirement. Again, this will be subject to a blog announcement as it comes in.
• LL is looking at ways to make keywords more effective and reduce the amount of keyword abuse / spamming; however no decisions on direction with this has yet been reached.

In Brief

• Requests for MP changes:
  • Add a “date listed” field to all MP listings (and possibly a “date updated” field).
  • Put a mechanism in place to prevent people using the Buy Now button when trying to buy an item as a gift for someone else (e.g. a warning that it does not apply to purchasing gifts).
  • Allowing “sub-stores” wherein Merchants who produce products of different types / for different markets can list their products in “sub-stores” under their main brand without the need to create avatar account to run individual stores. This is something that has been requested numerous times, and LL has previously indicated as something that could be considered, although the idea seems to have been lost along the way.
  • As an alternative to this, it was suggested that Merchants should have the means to categories products in their stores (e.g. have a dedicated category for discounts / special offers customers can easily reference without have to search the entire store.
• BUG-233043 “On the Marketplace Opengraph Metadata tags no longer work” – this prevents the sharing of links to products on various social media platforms from including previews on the item, with only the URL being displayed. It has been a problem since the end of 2022, and was raised again in a request for the Lab to look into it.
• Those attending the meeting were asked for thoughts on customers being able to leave product reviews without any verification that had actually purchased the product.
  • This was largely seen as a bad idea, due to the potential for malicious comments / griefing.
  • However, there is a possible use-case here in that it allows users purchasing a product in-world to leave a review where otherwise they have no public voice – although with CasperVend now owned by Linden Lab, and the promise of integration between the two, this might offer a path to allow purchases made via CasperVend vendors to be flagged as “verified” and thus allow their review on the MP.
• The length of MP URLs and difficulty in using them – together with requests for LL to provide a means of shortening them was discussed.
• The question was raised as to the Destination Guide either being properly curated so that non-existent locations could be removed – or a means provided to allow users report  those locations they find no longer exist in SL (or at least as the given region). This is something that will be passed back to the Destination Guide team.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023. Venue and time per top of this summary.

Update, March 8th: as per this official blog post, further fixes and improvements have been applied to the Marketplace search update.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, March 1st, 2023.

WUG meetings:

• Are held in-world, generally on the first Wednesday of the month – see the SL public calendar.
• Cover Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
• They are not intended for the discussion of Governance issues, land fees / issues, content creation & tools, viewer or simulator development / projects. Please refer to the SL calendar for information on available meetings for these topics.

A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and subject timestamps to the relevant points in the video are provided. Again, the following is a summary of key topics / discussions, not a full transcript of everything mentioned.

Marketplace Search

The updates to the Marketplace implementation of ElasticSearch have been deployed, This means:

• Merchant and store names won’t be included in product-specific searches anymore, increasing the number of relevant results.
• The ability to do exact matches with quotes around a word or phrase.
• Asterisk(*) wildcard searches.
• Fuzzy matching will help with misspelled words and typos.
• Search operators AND, OR, NOT will still work as before. (Note that they must be capitalised. Consult the tooltip next to keyword search for more information.).

Issues were encountered, such as the need to capitalise operators (as noted above), a bug with determining relevance, the result page displaying an inaccurate count of returns, etc. As per the official blog post, some of these have been addressed, and LL are watching the situation to address further issues as they occur.

In Brief

• A general discussion on how the MP & search is used, e.g.:
  • How deep people go in scanning search return lists.
  • Do people use the MP & search to find specific products or general browsing (market research, curiosity, etc.)?
  • Do people use the MP as a means to find items then then purchase in-world or do they prefer to browse in-world and purchase via the MP?
  • The answers were broad-ranging and likely typical of a mix of merchants and consumers.
• The question was asked about improving listing management for merchants, which generated numerous responses including:
  • Tags for listings, which when clicked will generate searches for items using the same tag.
  • An in-listing option for the owner of the listing to click on it to edit the listing directly.
  • Improvements to how discounts can be applied.
• It was suggested that questions such as these should be put to users via the forums in order to generate broader feedback.
• For details of these discussions, please refer to the video.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, April 5th, 2023. Venue and time per top of this summary.

The following notes cover the key points from the Web User Group (WUG) meeting, held on Wednesday, February 1st, 2023.

WUG meetings:

• Are held in-world, generally on the first Wednesday of the month – see the SL public calendar.
• Cover Second Life front-end web properties (Marketplace, secondlife.com, the sign-up pages, the Lab’s corporate pages, etc.).
• They are not intended for the discussion of Governance issues, land fees / issues, content creation & tools, viewer or simulator development / projects. Please refer to the SL calendar for information on available meetings for these topics.

A video of the meeting, courtesy of Pantera, can be found embedded at the end of this article (my thanks to her as always!), and subject timestamps to the relevant points in the video are provided. Again, the following is a summary of key topics / discussions, not a full transcript of everything mentioned.

Updates for January 2023

Land Portal Release

• [Video: 06:00-08:00] The new Land Portal has been launched. This is intended to be a central hub from which to get to all aspects of land “ownership” – purchasing regions, renting land from a private estate, renting or purchasing Mainland; obtaining a Linden Home.
• [Video: 10:33-10:49] There are currently no actual functionality changes to the pages behind the portal – these will come in time.
  • [Video: 8:51-9:22] The first of the Land pages to undergo update and improvement will be the Linden Homes page. This will make it easier to see and select available Linden Home styles – but this update “will be a while” before it is surfaced.
• Translations for the Portal and the Land pages will come in due course.
• The Portal has been used as something of a prototype, bringing together tools and technologies the Lab intend to use to build-out updated versions of their websites and portals, and ensure they are mobile-friendly.

• A technical blog post on what the web tools and ongoing website redesign means will be published be the Lab in the near future.

Marketplace Updates

• [[Video: 08:04-8:43] Search:
  • The deployment of the Marketplace Search updates has been further delayed, as indexing all searched to date is taking longer than anticipated to complete.
  • All other work is completed – the code is in place and ready to go – but LL want to ensure that search and order histories all remain in place when the switch is thrown.
  • once fully deployed, the new MP Search will have a close parity with the updated web search deployed in 2023, including its own relevance engine.
• [Video: 17:29-20:26] “Marketplace 2.0” – the Refresh / Rebuild:
  • Still being discussed / developed.
  • Will likely included further Search capabilities: fuzzy searching; negative tags / Boolean search options; the potential for improved filtering.

Marketplace Discussion Summary

Marketplace “Gold Star” Mechanism

[Video: 31:49-35:30]

One idea being floated internally at LL is the idea of awarding worn / attached items a “gold star” to items with a “low Land Impact”.

• The suggested approach would be to have some form of automated “side bake” mechanism which takes avatar attachments and assesses their LI, and then awards them a “gold star” on the basis of whether or not they remain within some defined “LI threshold”.  “Gold star wearables” would then be searchable as a category / categories within the MP.
• The core aims of this would be to:
  • Encourage wearable items creators to ensure their clothing and avatar attachment are more render performant/efficient (avatars currently have perhaps the highest performance impact, as no real constraints are currently placed on the complexity of worn items, so there is no incentive to model them as efficiently as possible).
  • Encourage consumers to consider what they are purchasing and its impact (“the gold star means it is better for you and SL”).
• This does raise concerns of further gaming of LOD (level of detail) in order to bring items in under the threshold, with the result that while they gain the “gold star” they nevertheless immediate collapse into one (or a small group) or triangles when seen from even a minimal distance – with creators who do so then “recommending” users set their viewer’s LOD rendering unnaturally high – and in the process further negatively impacting viewer performance.
• Alternatives offered at the meeting:
  • Utilise the revised avatar complexity calculations which form a part of the ARCTan project by which to measure the complexity of worn items (the problem here being the ARCTan project stalled some 2+ years ago and has yet to be re-started).
  • Utilise the “good LOD” calculations used for Animesh to encourage creators to model their clothing / attachments responsibly.

General Marketplace Discussion / Exchange of Ideas

[Video 20:42-31:45 + local chat]

• Variants (officially “Styles” – e.g. having multiple colour options for an item in a single listing) was again raised. No further direct feedback on this was given; however, at the January meeting it was indicated the work (which has apparently largely been done) is being “re-prioritised” in the face of the delays in deploying the updated MP Search.
• “One click demos” were suggested for the MP – being able to click on an attachment offing in the Marketplace and the item is temporarily worn in-world. This is something Garfield Linden indicated was of interest to him, and requested a Feature Request Jira on the idea.
• Search:
  • Phonetic searching was requested (particularly handy for those not well-versed in the currently-supported languages / dyslexia, where fuzzy search might over-compensate with results).  Sntax [sic] Linden acknowledged the “appeal” of phonetic searching.
  • Filtering clothing / attachments by body type: this is something the Marketplace Team are already looking at in terms of the “most popular” bodies – although how representative this might be of SL’s diversity is hard to determine.
• Pay what you want – suggested as a possible option to allow merchants to offer items for free, but with the option for buyers to offer a “tip” in payment.
  • The functionality for this may be overly complicated to implement.
  • However, in considering Marketplace updates / a rebuild, LL have looked at options for offering coupons, sales, and “price changey” options, so this idea will be added to the list for further internal discussion.
• It was acknowledged that Marketplace load times in the viewer’s browser (and the load times of other SL web properties a user may already be logged-in to) are “to darn high”, and that there are “performance skirmishes” to be had in this area.
• A suggestion was made for the Marketplace to support “related items” between stores. This would require engagement by Merchants, but the idea would be if Merchant A produced items intended for use with something Merchant B produces, they could mutually list one another’s products as being related. It could also be technically complex to implement.
• Marketplace and CasperVend integration: this is something LL would like to do following the purchase of CasperTech, and have had discussions about, but there are no firm plans as to have it might be tackled as yet.

Misc Items

Smart Landmarks

[Video 47:30-48:10]

• Mention was made of “Smart Landmarks” – LM’s that update when you move store / house.
• This is not something that is anywhere near being ready to ship (or perhaps evening being worked on), but it is on the Lab’s “wanna do” list.
• The late Darrius Gothly developed a scripted system called Virtual Landmarks, based on an original idea by Toysoldier Thor, almost a decade ago, although sadly, the system no longer functions. See: Virtual Landmarks: Solving an age-old problem?, closed Jira SVC-8082, and Virtual Landmarks: offering a solution to an age-old problem, plus, more recently BUG-232416.

World API Update

[Video 48:40-49:25]

• It has been notes that following a recent update, the World API reports banned agents as a part of the Group member count.
• It is not clear if the update caused this, but if so, it was not the intent. The matter has been noted for investigation.

Next Meeting

• Wednesday, March 1st, 2023. Venue and time per top of this summary.