New Second Life UG: WEB

This Friday 11/10 was the first meeting of a new user group, Web. This meeting is for discussion of all the Second Life™ web properties.

I’ve combined the summary and index.

03:45 – Getting Started. Welcome.

Alexa, Grumpity, and Awna Linden decided to put together this meeting. Also, in attendance were Natty, Saboteur, and Spidey Linden… about 40% of the audience was Linden.

While there have been user groups for smaller parts of the various Second Life products. This UG will be for all the SL web properties;

  1. SecondLife.com
  2. Maps
  3. Marketplace
  4. Search
  5. Auctions
  6. com
  7. Profiles
  8. Join Flow
  9. Promotion Marketing
  10. World Second Life Events (?)
  11. New Splash Login Screen
  12. Place Pages
  13. Destination Guide
  14. Landing Pages

These meetings will touch on different topics within this group of properties. A primary goal is to get feedback from the users of these properties.

06:30 – The best way to reach all members of this Linden Team is to file a JIRA bug or feature request. A JIRA gets the most people looking at your problem or request.

An interesting point is this group does DAILY bug triage and weekly feature analysis/evaluation.

09:20 – Alexa’s section of the forum. See Second Life Web. This tends to be a monthly thing on her part.

11:50 – Jessicaann Wigglesworth asks about improvements in search. She is rebranding her MP Store. Her problem is checking for names in use within the SL system to find a new unused name, I think.

If you type a name in the MP search you get the names of people without a store, in addition to those with stores. So, there is clutter in the results. A feature might be a checkbox to limit the search to only those with stores.

13:45 – Issues with editing MP listings. One is the sort order, placing the oldest item first. So, to get the recent items one is most likely to want to edit one has to resort and wait. After that item is edited on return to the list of items it has returned to the oldest first sort order.

17:30 – Boolean search does not work for eliminating Demos from the search results. I think many of us have this problem. It is possible to eliminate most of the demos by filtering for items that cost >2L$.

There is also the problem of dozens of copies of the same product in different colors. Having a drop down for color selection would reduce the repetition. Also, having a way to eliminate the duplicates via search would be a help. See BUG-10853.

There is a chat discussion going on about Map Tile Generation for the World Maps. Certain things in the world do not correctly render in the tiles. One annoying problem is the mega-prims.

24:20 – Another problem is encountered when sending a gift from the marketplace. Click the send as gift, enter the name and message, click add to cart… but, then the BUY button is right there and users click BUY. Wrong! The next thing the merchant knows is they have a message that their ‘gift’ was sent to the buyer, not the intended gift recipient. But, the BUY button is for you to buy the thing. Go to the Cart for check out without clicking BUY.

There is the problem of the buyer not entering the last name of the gift recipient. So, if the often-neglected last name ‘Resident’ is not entered, the gift purchase fails.

Also, sometimes a Display Name is used for the gift recipient name. The gift often ends up being delivered to an avatar with the same but ‘real’ (meaning not a Display Name) name.

AineMari Flanagan was asking why not use Avatar UUID’s…. really!?!

A solution to the Display Name confusion may be to pull up the recipient’s profile and ask if this is the right target.

Also, if you do not know, to do the gift purchase, you MUST check out from the cart, not the BUY button that is on the page.

See WEB-3531Suggested Change to Add To Cart and Buy Now buttons to Improve Gifting Feature. (Jan 2011)

29:15 – Now the idea of cleaning old stuff out of the marketplace. Do we take out the stuff of those that haven’t logged in within 3 years? Stuff that no one has bought in 2 years? What about the stuff of those that have been banned, perma-banned? And those that have died?

Plus, there are some banned products that are still for sale. For instance, a card gambling machine that does not meet the skill gaming criteria and was disabled years ago. But, one can still buy it.

Of course, there are people that made things, put them on the MP, and have not logged in in years and yet the products still work well and sell. What do we do with those?

35:40 – The idea of charging a fee to list an item in the MP is put forward. You can imagine how that goes over. But, if Premium Members got special consideration…

With fees significantly changing in January 2018, now may not be the time to rub the wound.

It was surprising to see a number of people considering ways to increase fees, or at least make them more palatable.

The rest of the meeting continues on this discussion. It is mostly ‘Suppose…’ so, I see no point in summarizing here. No decisions are being made. So, the next meeting in 2 weeks will likely have more substantive material on the subject.

I have hopes for this group.

2 thoughts on “New Second Life UG: WEB

  1. I’m most interested in RSS feeds for profiles. It would make grabbing and sharing screenshots a snap. Was there any discussion of this? I meant to attend but it conflicted with RL work.

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