Life Without Web Panels

Panels for Virtual Week-ality, screenshot by Pan Diman.

Feels like it’s been ages since the last VRChat update, but they finally managed to announce something new, and the big surprise is, they removed web panels the majority of active VRChat users was quite fond of.

Yesterday, Tupper made an announcement, “VRChat has identified a security issue regarding Web Panels, and as a result, Web Panels have been disabled.”

“We are not aware of any attempts to exploit this security issue,” VRChat mentioned in their Medium blog post, “nor have we received reports of any users being impacted. Regardless, VRChat has decided to err on the side of caution and disable Web Panels across VRChat. Please note, this will also affect the On Screen Keyboard — notably, international users will find that their keyboard may not function as expected. In these cases, you may need to copy and paste your username and password into the login field using the Ctrl-V shortcut to paste.”

Countless users said the panels allowed them to work on things VRChat isn't able to present without using additional software. Unfortunately, many people, including our lead editor, relied on the panels as a tool used for something special.

Hakanai, one of many content creators who knows how useful the panels were, said on the Discord server, “They really should have described the security issue more specifically so that we could properly attack them on the way the choice was wrong. At the current point it's like, ‘oh, another feature in VRChat didn't work right,’ so they removed it instead of fixing it.”

The panels were removed because VRChat was afraid of getting in possible trouble caused by security issues, but it doesn’t make the facts any less sad. Not too long ago, kanata and his friends held a 2-hour-long funeral for web panels.

It is most definitely unfortunate that web panels aren’t supported anymore, and there are many outraged users who never expected this outcome, even though video panels should still work in VRChat... for now.