Linden Lab Announces Its Community Gateway Program Is Back

In August 2010, Linden Lab announced it was ending it's Community Gateways program as part of it's "new approach to welcoming residents" at the time. This move, along with the end of the SL Volunteer program in December 2009, was panned by critics as a sign of either cluelessness and/or a lack of interest in helping new residents. At the time, the Lab stated it had doubts about it being an effective use of their resources. In September 2015, Inara Pey stated that community gateways were set for a comeback. And a number were set up, such as the one by Firestorm, which can be seen at Firestorm Social Island.

On Wednesday May 31, Linden Lab officially announced the Community Gateway program had returned.

We are thrilled to re-introduce the Community Gateway Program!  Previously, the Community Gateway program helped bring new users to Second Life, by enabling Second Life communities to attract, register, an on-board new Residents. The program was shelved in 2010 as resources were reprioritized, and now we're excited to reintroduce the Community Gateway program along with some improvements that will make it even more valuable to Second Life.  We recognize the benefit of having Resident supported tutorial areas and have been working with several communities while fine tuning the new program over the last year.  

This powerful new tool will allow you to register new users right from your own community website and add them automatically to your group, thus helping your community to grow!

The blog post described the program as allowing communities to "create a new user experience and attract residents" to the community, help new residents into beginning their Second Life experience, guide new residents in the "creation of their new avatar personas," and help with new user retention.

Of the last detail, Second Life is described as having a very low new user retention. Increasing it would be a step in halting and reversing it's overall long slow decline in numbers.

Details about the program, including how to apply, are here in the official Second Life Wiki.


For the Blog post in full: Click here. 

Source: Daniel Voyager  , Inara Pey 

Bixyl Shuftan