EOTB: The "Marketplace UI Overhaul"

 

On Tuesday September 16, Linden Lab announced on their blog they had done a "Marketplace UI Overhaul." The main purpose was to make the Second Life Marketplace easier to use on a smartphone or tablet, but there were other changes. 

 

We’re making some much-needed updates to the Second Life Marketplace. Our goal is to create a modern, unified experience that is more responsive and easier to use on any device. We’ve been working on the UI and UX, and these changes are rolling out across desktop, tablet, and mobile browsers. 

The Lab stated the changes are a work in progress and some adjustments are not yet finished or haven't been launched yet. 

 

Right now, the new responsive product, category, and search results pages are live, and we are still working on making the rest of the site responsive as well. You may have noticed that some other pages, including the Marketplace home page, have been updated with some of the new elements, but are not yet fully responsive. We are still in an awkward in-between phase as we work to unify the presentation of all the pages on the site.

 

This includes "Image Zoom" to help with crisp images when pictures are enlarged and "Page Gutters" that are thicker on wider screens but should be slimmer on thinner ones.

 

On some Discord threads, another change has been noticed. On some pages, inworld locations have been removed. Some called this desireable as on an outdated page one can find themselves plummeting down to earth or being thrown out of a yard by a security system as the store the inworld location that used to be there had been abandoned. 

 

For more information, chuck the Linden Blog (here). 

 

SL Universe Forums To Become VirtualVerse

Many if not most longtime Second Life residents have heard of the SL Universe forums. Sometimes factual with discussions about some of the latest developments and events in Second Life, and sometimes irreverent with some "peanut gallery" discussions, it has been pretty much anything but boring. It's also moved beyond Second Life in topic discussions going to various real-life matters such as politics. Turning 15 years old this November, owner Cristiano Midnight posted on Thursday September 20 that SL Universe was undergoing it's "Third Major Act" in it's history.

So a lot has happened in the past 24 hours. I nearly lost 2.4 million posts and obliterated SLU, got them back, perhaps may have cried a little, then made some decisions about what to do about SLU.

I detailed what I was going through my mind in this post, so I won't repeat it. However, since writing that, I made some rapid decisions that are already in motion.

First of all, I am launching a new site - VirtualVerse, which expands the scope of SLU to all things related to virtual worlds, whether it is Second Life, Sansar, other VR worlds that are gaining in popularity, or game related worlds like MMOs and open world games. I've wanted to become less SL centric, but it has been hard to do that with SL as part of the name.

The SLU forums will be closing within the next few weeks, depending on how long the transition takes. These forums will be archived - they may be unavailable for little while but will come back as a read only forum.

The new site domain is VirtualVerse.one - http://www.virtualverse.one

Why .one? There has been a significant number of new top level domains added, and I considered .cloud, .site and even .ninja, but .one appealed to me the most, since this also is starting over in many ways.

Cristiano's near-loss of so many posts was presumably because of trying to save them as they had become corrupted, according to the post he had made the day before, in which he had pondered the future of SL Universe.

Taking a look at VirtualVerse, the topics were grouped in three categories. "VirtualVerse Related" has topics such as "Site Announcements." "Virtual World Discussion is where you can find the "Second Life" group of threads, other virtual worlds and MMOs being the other two categories. "Off-Topic Discussion" is about everything else, such as "Politics, Religion, and Society." This has the most groups of threads.

Again, thank you for your patience while I've been dealing with all of this - and while I know it is a bit scary to move to an entirely new forum and site, the move ensures that this can all continue. I'm extremely excited by it. I'll go into more detail about why I made this change soon.

Image source: Ryan Schultz

Bixyl Shuftan