Community Gateways for Second Life

Once upon a time Second Life™ had community gateways, Linden sponsored, built, and managed. In 2010 they closed. In 2011 user sponsored gateways opened.  (Reference – an out dated list of gateways) In 2011 when Rodvik Linden, then CEO, was asked if they would ever come back, he didn’t know what they were. Then in late 2011 we got the Destination Guide and user gateways were depreciated.

So, are they coming back?

1 stare at the hole

Portal ? Gateway? Trap? Conveyance?

First, if you don’t know, community gateways are places where new users are dropped at first login. The location is designed for new users and is typically filled with tutorials and teaching experiences. Back in 2011 Prim Perfect did a piece on what are Community Gateways: So what were these community gateways? An answer for Rodvik Linden. Gateways are sort of synonymous portals. The portal is the sign up web site. The gateway is the region the portal sends you to. That it isn’t set in stone, but it will give you a since of how the words are often used..

We have already been speculating on whether portals for Sansar are a good thing. See: Drama: Community Portals for Second Life 2. We have had loads of people documenting how bad some of the gateways are: Second Life: The New New User Tutorial. We have had some great gateways: Second Life Player Retention 2014-21. Continue reading

Drama: Community Portals for Second Life 2

Hamlet pointed to my article: Ebbe Altberg Interview in his article SL 2 to Launch Without Shared First-Time User Experience. He took an idea in my writing much farther than I did. His quote from my article:

For SL2 they are developing toward user created experiences and will thus bypass a uniform path for all new users. So, the concept of a single entry door for SL will vanish. The Lab will provide retention data to experience owners. They will let designers compare their experience retention to other experiences, designs, methods, and retention rates. With solid objective data flowing back to the designers, it may be possible to find the magic combination.

It seems he and others took this to mean there would only be entry to SL2 via community portals. I never it took what Ebbe said to mean that. But, obviously others inferred that was what I implied.  Continue reading