Delby Linden announced today on the official Second Life blog that there will be A New Approach to Welcoming Residents. In this post it mentions that Communuity Gatways will be end “effective immediately”. Linden Lab believes new user experience is “fundamentally connected to specific user-created content”. Linden Lab will remove the Community Gateways from the registration starting 19th August 2010.
As we move towards this goal, we are ending the Community Gateway (CG) program, effective immediately. Ultimately, we want new Residents to be able to begin their time in Second Life at any location, connecting immediately to user-created experiences that interest them.
The Community Gateway program was a step in the right direction. It was intended to help give new Residents a starting point associated with a particular inworld community, often based on geography and language, and a few were successful in turning newcomers into engaged Second Life Residents.
However, many showed lower rates of retention than our own Welcome Island. Additionally, we’ve found that many new users were confused by the option of starting in Community Gateway and abandoned the registration process at that point. We will remove Community Gateways from the current registration path on August 19 in order to simplify registration and give us a more reliable baseline metric to use for comparison as we go forward with our new approach.
Another ending for helping new residents in Second Life and as many know the SL Volunteer program was shut down in December 2009.
Though we are ending the Community Gateway program and changing the registration experience, we will keep these spaces in the Destination Guide, so that Residents can easily find and join these communities.
I’d like to thank the participants in the Community Gateways program for all of their hard work. It is always a difficult decision to end an initiative like this, but it’s what we need to do to focus on making Second Life a faster, easier, and more enjoyable experience for all.
Read the full blog post here.
Fast, Easy & Fun it seems Linden Lab wants but it seems to be the opposite at times. There are many that spend alot of time helping new residents in Second Life everyday and this is not the right way forward in closing down programs. What do you think about this? – Let me know your thoughts. 🙂
Daniel Voyager 