So, I had my first couple of meetings as a Level 1 User Member on https://ca.meet.coop recently.
Here is a bunch of feedback:
When I join a room on my mobile (firefox on andriod) I get 4 notifications about the current presentation which take ages to clear by themselves and cover the whole screen.
I’ve noticed a similar thing on my laptop too, but seemingly only get 2 notifications there.
Ideally I don’t ever want the default presentation to load (which I guess would also solve the above issues with these annoying notifications)
Connecting on my mobile on firefox on andriod involves WAY too many clicks (I count 9) to give permissions for audio/ video working. Also, during those 9 clicks, I have to choose the front facing camera twice.
I really don’t like all the ‘helpful’ audio prompts “you are currently the only person in this conference”, “you are now muted”, “you are now unmuted” etc - is there anyway to turn these off?
I think that’s it for now. I think there probably ought to be a User Feedback category on here too, as wasn’t sure where best to post this and there are now a bunch of related posts.
Thanks for creating and adding this post to a new User Feedback category @decentral1se but I now note there is also a Site Feedback category too! (I think User Feedback is a better name than Site Feedback though… So perhaps keep Site Feedback but rename to User Feedback?)
@hng@Yasuaki after we upgrade BBB to collocall stack (new version of BBB), we should gather the Apple users among our Operational Members and do a test together with Safari Desktop and Mobile, then document what actually works and what doesn’t. There are a lot of mixed results: codec failures, timeouts, video failures, screen share failures, etc. We need to know what works and what doesn’t to start for the particular version we’re running.
Regarding mee.coop, some issues we found that made us choose not to use it:
it asks to reconnect the microphone and do an echo test every time a user joins, moves to a breakout session and back to the main room (although I have asked the browser to remember the permission) this is annoying and distracting, especially if any of the users is not very tech savvy.
audio comes with echo (although it asks for echo test every time!) and no/or too little background noise reduction, so if there’s a person speaking over street noise, the noise comes out loud and clear so it makes it a bit difficult to follow.
no messaging/announcements for all breakout sessions. And no option to leave the breakout session and come back to the main one. As a facilitator, although these two are not strictly necessary features, they are very useful one.
Hopefully there’s some future improvements and we can switch to it, thanks for the work!
IIRC the problem with the repeated echo test in breakout rooms should get fixed with BBB 2.3.
Quite a few people have reported this by now. I haven’t seen this problems myself so I think it would be interesting to get more details on these setups.
Bluntly: Is there an expectation that joining a meeting on the phone with speakers on a noisy street should work? Is zoom really good with that?
I’ve looked into tuning the noise cancelation at some point but I think there was not a lot you could do. I don’t know if zoom is doing some high level AI stuff etc.
I am hoping this is the right place to report this. The issue we are getting is that, the download link for a recording meeting is not working (redirects to 404).
Feedback from Dil Green - a user on Matt Slats account:
We just had an intersting one with meet. coop which surprised me - on a call with 5 or 6 people, one in NZ on mobile. His signal was bad and on meet.coop, no-one could understand a words he said (no video).
Someone suggested trying zoom and I privately thought it would make no difference - didn’t see how zoom could solve such terribly signal bandwidth - even with fancy compression.
I have to say I was shocked - zoom made him sound as if he was in the next room., and held up without a hitch for a one hour call including him presenting.
So if BBB are putting energy anywhere, I think that might be where.
Similar issues here. I had a meeting this evening with the Diss Community Farm, using BBB for the first time, when we were used to Zoom. Only about 7 separate users, although some had 2 or 3 people on the same machine. People said the sound was worse than Zoom, and especially background noise. We had to keep people muted more than we are used to on Zoom. This is a serious issue. Is there anything that can be done about it? One couple couldn’t get in on a Mac with an older version of Safari, but were ok on an iPad. Do we know what machines and browers are preferred or no good with BBB?
Hi @dvdjaco! Nice to be here. Looking forward to the community response.
Just an update, we had the second session yesterday and the problem persists. The link generated was this. The video can be seen in the list of sessions recorded of the room link I shared above.
Yeah, the sad reality is that sound and video quality of BBB is simply no way near as good nor as stable as on Zoom
I’m not sure there is anything Meet.coop can realistically do about it either. I’ve no real idea, but I’d guess it’s just that BBB hasn’t had the investment in writing better audio/ video processing code that works better? Or perhaps it’s just that we don’t yet have load balancing servers all over the world? (hopefully the latter because that will hopefully eventually be solved).
But, yes, the issue with old versions of Safari has been mentioned on here a few times, so I’d say certainly best to try to avoid using Safari if possible.
edit2:
it seems i am flagged by discourse as sharing promotional content, and the original messages with the links are not visible anymore. i understand the link posting limits for new users, but the error reports with links to the ca.meet.coop should not have been flagged.
This is really a serious issue for Meet.coop. I am trying BBB with various groups, but find myself constantly asked why not just use Zoom, which people are used to.
It looks like we are offering a service that is in direct competition to Zoom, that seems inferior, but is more ‘right on’. Not a promising stance!!
We could do a lot more, including a broader package that includes BBB and Discourse, peer support and mentoring, and events for members. Then it is clear that you aren’t just getting another Zoom-like service, but are part of a community with lots of support and other advantages.
I’m sorry to say I had a bad experience with BBB yesterday. My wife wanted to try to use it with her women’s group, a generous offer I thought. However, we failed. Some of the women couldn’t connect. The problem seemed to be older Macs using Safari. We had to give up and let them go back to Zoom. This is not a good sign!
Older versions of Safari do not support WebRTC at all. So we are out of luck here. Could you find out which version of Safari was used? In general it is recommended to use Firefox and Chrome with BigBlueButton. Zoom “cheats” a bit here as it forces its users to install the zoom app. As having BBB running just in the browser without the need to install extra software is actually a good thing end users need to make sure to use an up to date browser.
Zoom doesn’t enable their in-browser WebRTC client by default; I assume they had the same issues with browser compatibility and gave up in favour of forcing their app, which still seems to have been working fine for them in terms of user growth (although they did get an unfair advantage from hacking people’s Macs to help get it on there easier).
I had a quick look to see anyone has made an app wrapping BBB in a decent browser (like Jitsi’s Electron app) but couldn’t find anything. Unless and until that exists – and I have no idea how difficult it would be to make it so – I still think providing phone dial-in is gonna be the best option… although whether that’ll help folks in NZ will depend how much we’re willing to throw down on SIP numbers – the public Jitsi meet instance doesn’t have an NZ number, by comparison.
