I don’t think a major BigBlueButton version will be out for a while (there isn’t a alpha release yet and after that there would be release candidate versions, 2.0.0 came out on 8th April 2019 after 12 RC versions), I anticipate that for this year we will probably we will be on 2.2.x versions. Have a browse of the releases here to get an idea of the rate of releases and what is getting fixed with each version.
It is slightly annoying that a session cookie isn’t set to indicate that the mic and speakers are working after one audio test and that you have to click a few time between rooms, but as has been said above there isn’t an easy fix for this, but as people get used it perhaps it won’t be too bad? It will probably reduce the number of people joining rooms and reporting their issues to everyone — the point of it is to allow users to check that everything is working before they join a meeting.
Regarding the breakout room limit, this is based on some underlying tech that limits the number of rooms to 8. Were you thinking or running all the sessions in breakout rooms — is this why it is an issue? I’d suggest creating as many rooms as you expect to have sessions running in parallel and then put the URL of each meeting room on the agenda, each of these rooms can have 8 break out rooms and if more are needed create some additional rooms to host breakout rooms in advance?
Set the main rooms to only be open to authenticated users and this, combined with people needing to buy a ticket in order to have an account, will mean that anyone trying to “Zoom bomb” a meeting will first need to buy a ticket and once they have had their access revoked after misbehaving would need to buy another… hopefully this will be enough…
I think having a public page on which people have the whole agenda and links to all the session rooms, informal chat hang-out type rooms and plenary rooms, in advance, would really help, it should allow people to bookmark the agenda and then flit between rooms fairly easily without getting lost.
I appreciate that rehearsals and testing is needed in advance and that time is tight.
The dev server, dev.meet.coop is set to invite only and you can use this for testing as much as you like.
The demo server, demo.meet.coop is open for anyone to have a play on it — I’d suggest, if you decide to use meet.coop
for the event, that you let everybody who has a ticket, plus people you want to encourage to buy tickets, know that they can test BigBlueButton in advance using this server.
However note that dev.meet.coop
and demo.meet.coop
might well be down on occasions, for very short periods, as we test things and do upgrades.
We do now have the production server up and running, ca.meet.coop and www.meet.coop
and meet.coop
will redirect here when it is ready. I hope to have it ready for Monday. There are quite a few things that need doing first and I expect I’ll be doing 12 hour days on Saturday and Sunday to sort everything out, first we need to sort out the disk partitions.
As soon as we are confident that the server is ready we will let you have admin accounts on it to set things up.
I believe that @decentral1se has fixed the recordings issue and also the conversion of the recording into .mp4
format, so downloads will be available.
I appreciate that what we are offering isn’t the corporate service that people might have become accustomed to during lockdown.
This is an experiment to try to build something new, we are making it up as we go along, the best we can, with a belief that a better world is possible, there will be hiccups on the way but I’m quietly confident that we might pull this one off, but it is going to take a lot of work and we are still at the start of the journey.
I think it would benefit meet.coop
and open.coop
if we undertake this journey together, on the understanding that we are breaking new ground and we might falter on the way, but we are both heading in the same direction and the journey might be perhaps a little harder, but more exciting and quicker if we take some short cuts together and ride the crest of the wave rather than waiting for other pioneers and following in their wake.
I hope you do decide to use meet.coop
for Open 2020, I know we are going to get very little sleep for the next week if you do, but I think it’ll be worth it.