Happy Monday!

We’re writing today to remind everyone that we’ll be holding our monthly Web User Group meeting on Wednesday, Oct. 2nd at 14:00 SLT in our usual meeting place, and also to highlight for the community at large some of the things that our Web team has been working on for the last month, and wow, there sure is a lot to choose from!

First, we need to acknowledge that a large portion of our time has been spent making on-going back-end changes that our Residents may never notice directly, but which will provide a much more secure and pleasant experience for all going forward. For example, we’ve already completed a full-scale migration of multiple web services away from our dedicated hardware colo and into the cloud. Others have been moved from third-party vendors to an in-house implementation. Still, others have been decoupled from their previous dependencies into stand-alone services. This is all part of our long term plan to move all of our services, from the web properties to the Second Life grid itself, providing us greater reliability, flexibility, and security across the board. We’ll let you try to guess which services have already been migrated - we’re betting you’ll never know the difference!

Second, we’re extremely pleased to say that in the last month we’ve made significant progress in laying the foundations for the long-awaited Name Changes feature.  All of our teams have been working hard on preparing the grid and all of our systems to accommodate account name changes, both first and last. We’re not quite ready to release all the details yet, but suffice to say that if you’ve ever wanted to change up your account name for whatever reason (and we know you have!) STAY TUNED.

Finally, our continuing dedication to improving the Marketplace experience continues. Last month we were very excited to release the new Store Managers functionality. And this month, we’ve been refining that experience, as well as adding more new features for Merchants such as in-world messaging when an item is sold. But we haven’t forgotten the most important part of the Marketplace, the customers! For them, we’ve added a “Gifts Received” page with details about what the items are, who sold it, who bought it, any gift message, with much-requested options for self-service redelivery! 

All of this on top of our usual laundry list of bug fixes, quality of life improvements, security updates, and general troubleshooting. Whew! 

It’s been a heck of a September, and this post is only scratching the surface of what we’ve done and what we’re planning for October through the end of the year, so come on by the Web User Group meeting this Wednesday at 14:00 SLT to share your thoughts and to hear ours!