On Wednesday 31st May Linden Lab announced the re-introducing of the Community Gateway Program in Second Life. This is really good news to hear that the program will be returning again. Yay! 🙂
As many remember the lab axed the program back in August 2010 as “resources were reprioritized”. The good news is that over the past year the lab have been working with a number of communities to try to make it work again.
Today there are still many active Community Gateways in Second Life doing a fantastic job in helping new users get started with their new journeys. The return of the program will hopefully kick-start more folks helping new users in Second Life again.
The full blog announcement, see below:
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 program allows Second Life Communities to:
Create a new user experience and attract Residents to your specific community
Assist those new Residents in beginning their journey into Second Life
Lend a guiding hand in the creation of their new avatar personas
Assist with increasing new user retention.
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!
All details about this program (including how to apply) may be found here.
For more information, check out the Community Gateway wiki page.
Daniel Voyager 