Small, mutable video on the side would be nice. Tough to be a session chair when you haven't seen the talk!

Implement the mechanism for archiving videos to a provided YouTube channel including:

• Stitching together the lightning talk and Q&A
• Auto-uploading the video
• Setting the description to the abstract
  • including links to the papers
• Auto-creating playlists based on:
  • the session period
  • the content's tag
• Auto-emailing authors to notify them of where their videos can be found
• Ensuring existing subtitles are transferred across (after we've cleaned up ones that went wrong)

On maximized windows, the chat takes considerable space that could be used for the videocall instead. Maybe if we could close the chat just like the sidebar or resize the chat it would be nice.

Separate the following into different S3 buckets:

• User-uploaded content
• Profile pictures
• Generated (broadcast) content

Ideally, the chat would not split by character, but by words, avoiding the following scenario:

Possibly useful feature during coffee breaks

After entering login credentials (using the link with the invite code embedded, or just by using the link that does not contain the code), only the top of the main page is shown with the buttons (incl "LogOut") near the top, but the rest of the page just shows the spinning wheel. Clearing history, quitting browser etc doesn't solve the issue - the only way to participate in the conference is to by pass Clowdr and go to the zoom room of a session (if you happen to know the zoom room...).This issue has been preventing me now to log back into Clowdr for 2h. I've given a few more details in a mail to Ed, Jon, Crista.

On a big screen, it would be nice to have the sidebar there permanently rather than needing to click the icon in the top-left corner every time.

Scrolling may get stuck, hiding the buttons to mute/unmute and activate/deactivate camera

If you join the room, there is none there, but they are still listed as active

The the moment shuffles queue are processed first-come first-served. It is fairly simple to substitute the algorithm used to do the allocation in the backend, provided said algorithm is a pure function over the existing queue state.

Various suggestions have been made, all including some element of randomisation.

The key problem to solve is what happens when a room ends and a group of 3 to 6 people all go straight back into the queue. They would rather not end up all in another room together (as that defeats the purpose of the system). Some kind of historic knowledge of room allocations may need to be included in the allocation algorithm to solve this.

The app is saving at every character typed! Make it save more sparsely.
I think saving should not be automatic, and, instead, it should be a explicit action by the user. This is because we can make mistakes, and there is no "undo." So it's better if saves are explicit rather than automatic. (like the content and people panels)

There is a suggestion from FPGA that it may be useful to have the ability to give certain attendees access to run their sponsor booth but not access to the rest of the conference.

When two feeds are played one after the other in the same livestream and the second does not have embedded captions/subtitles, AWS seems to loop back on the previous video's subtitles.

We also need to go back and fix this for the existing Q&A recordings from POPL, which have ended up with incorrect subtitles embedded.

I'm making this an issue so it's a bit easier for you to triage, but feel free to close it and move this somewhere else if needed.

I have some broad, design-based feedback that I hope you'll keep in mind as Clowdr evolves. I imagine you've already thought about some of these points, but hopefully some of them are novel.

Modelling Concepts for the User

At one point I heard an attendee say “there’s more on the screen now [versus at ICFP]”. This is patently false, but that was the perception. I propose that the issue here is concept modelling.

Having fewer concepts isn’t necessarily better.

Unifying DMs, rooms, breakouts, etc into a single "concept" seems nice on the surface (there's only one thing to learn), but I suspect users don't see it that way. Users have already learned what a DM is---it’s a little chat box somewhere that sends a message to a particular person. By unifying DMs with other concepts, we actually put more burden on the user.

Unified concepts in the back-end need not be unified in the front-end.

This is related to the previous point, but worth stating on its own. It’s totally fine that every chat room has an associated video room, but the “announcements” channel (for example) should not have that video room exposed. (I’ve seen confused people sitting around in the announcements room.)

More Focus on High-Level Views

Users have high-level questions that they want to answer. Where is everyone? What are all of the events happening today? etc. The current interface has some of these views (if you know where to look), but they’re not up-front and obvious.

This could actually be fixed fairly easily with a few UI tweaks. I think the schedule should automatically start more “zoomed out” so the first thing the user sees is a birds-eye view. The rooms tab should sort social rooms to the top and set them apart, making it clear where to find people.

Personally I’d even like to see these things together somewhere. Dashboards make me feel in control of a piece of software.

Minor Points

• Viewer counts - I don't think they actually add anything (especially when they're negative)
• Smaller border radii - Seems like a silly point, but I think shrinking the border radii a bit will make everything feel more professional
• Fix elements relative to page size - Getting a new message modifies everything on the page; chat windows should probably be fixed-size, rather than growing with the content

The icon resembles to be enabled when it's disabled and vice-versa

When you toggle light mode/dark mode while you're in a room, your video and audio gets duplicated and people see multiples copies of your user

When someone creates a room, others apparently do not see it until they refresh their browsers.

If you enter a room, turn off your microphone, and then turn it back on, you get a desync between your video and microphone that is quite distracting.

Muting seems to work better, but the "turn off microphone" button is much more prominent.

Role/Group/Attendee not created. Probably a missing "creator" permission since we re-did permissions during POPL.

At this time, the chat does not detect links.
#minor

Chat is currently built upon Hasura Subscriptions, which although they run over a websocket, Hasura is ultimately just polling the Postgres db at a defined rate (1s -- though for much of POPL we had to throttle this to 1.5s). This isn't real time and murders our Postgres load.

We should re-implement chat on a socket.io / Redis layer on top of Heroku with a write-back buffer that batches writes into Postgres.

We should aim initially to:

• support chats with ~2,000 members, with 10% sending a message every 10s to be received by all others. This will be a sufficient target for our upcoming conferences.
• have happens-before consistency, though eventual-consistency may be sufficient
• have the ability to scale the backend servers horizontally using Heroku's automated scaling

Give sponsor reps ability to edit their booth's content

Implement archiving of chats:

• Public chats (papers/keynotes/co-events items but not public breakout rooms) need digests sent via email as file attachments to the relevant people
• Private chats (DMs, private groups) need digests sent to their respective participants

At POPL 2021, when I try to navigate directly to the "Rooms" page when not logged in, the error message about trouble loading data is quite opaque. I wish it would say "log in, dude"!

Auto-save here us a nuisance! Consider this use case:

• Create a new event. This creates an entry with times that default to the current time. The entry ends up somewhere on the table.
• Change the day/time. Poof! the entry suddenly disappears out of focus and goes somewhere else on the table. We need to visually search for it.

Here's what I suggest:

• Creating a new event places a new entry at the very top of the table
• Let me edit it to my heart's content, and then let me press a Save button
• (Ideally, but not as important as the last two things) If the entry changed places on the table, show me where it went

If you join a room and then turn on your camera, then you get two copies of your video in the chat.

At least, I'm pretty sure that's what's causing it.

Why send all the information to doubleclick

Long text announcements block the chat window and there is no way to get rid of them without leaving the room.

Right now this is done by Ed on the backend. This needs to be exposed to organizers.

The admin interface needs to be brought up to scratch so that it is self-service for conference organisers.

1. A button to immediately end pre-recorded playback and go into Q&A mode
2. Pre-recorded videos that last longer than their allocated time slot should go straight to Q&A after finishing (if one is scheduled afterwards) rather than padding with filler video

When there are too many participants in a room, the alignment breaks (Chrome - MacOS), and the video gets out of the frame

Give sponsor reps the ability to schedule events in their booth (only).

• When you get moved from the waiting queue into the Join Room page, you should get an audible signal (in case you have switched to looking at email while waiting).
• Instead of "Rooms limited to..." it should say "Rooms will reshuffle after X minutes"
• When it goes into "Sorry, it may not be possible to match you with anyone at the moment" mode, it should either tell me that it is still trying to match me or else give me a button to leave.
• "Please wait" should be renamed to "Waiting for more people to join"

Another icon might be more appropriate.
Eventually, it would probably makes sense to have an actual "settings" button, opening up a list of possible settings, including toggle dark mode.

If a user hasn't read a message within 1hr of it being sent, send an email notifying them.

Clicking the delete button doesn't delete. Make it do so.

We don't currently gather any analytics data. We should collect/provide at least the following:

• Video view counts
• Video watch time graphs
• Paper-link click counts
• Viewer count graphs for livestreams

Right now, we need to enter each content person one by one. This won't scale. It needs a CSV upload mechanism.

Currently, the POPL room "Hallway 1" has -4 people in it. This has bounced between -4 and 0 for the last hour or so as people have come and gone.

I'm not sure what's causing it, but it's probably something to look into.

If I send a message in a chat of a room, I only see the message after clicking refresh. I see messages of others immediately.

I'm on Mozilla Firefox 84.0 and can send more information on the browser / plugins / OS if you tell me what you need to know

Thanks a lot for the great work!

If there are rooms (like POPL, POPL-A, and POPL-B) that hold lots of events, there should be a prominent direct link on the main page.

Lots of rooms hang around after their events. Make a flag? Have a GC button that lets admins destroy rooms that (a) have no future events scheduled, (b) aren't DMs or whatever, and (c) haven't been used in X minutes.

It's unclear what the exact sequence of events is that leads to this, but some people are still encountering problems signing up when they receive the initial invitation. The Clowdr app gets into a state that doesn't let them signup and/or accept the invitation. In some cases, they need to enter the registration code by hand, and it's not clear what that registration code is.

Hint: this may be related to the use of Safari first. Not sure.

Two action items here:

• Include the invitation code in the email, additionally to the invitation link, so that at least it's easier for people to copy it

• These issues need to be investigated, reproduced, and fixed.

At POPL 2021, I jumped from a hallway room to a lightning talk, and my webcam is telling me it's still on, with its usual light. Is Clowdr keeping video/audio recording on for longer than needed, representing a privacy risk in case of bugs?

Would be great to see number of users online, users in Q&A rooms, chats per minute, views per video (which need some custom tracking, I think!).

For various reasons, we might need to get a user to click “refresh” in clowdr. We need a system to 1: set these bits for each session of each user, and 2: cease all requests from that session until the page is refreshed.

Ed wrote in Slack:

We probably just need a backend var that has a timestamp for 'last required refresh time' and a frontend timestamp in local storage that stores the last time we asked the user to refresh. And the rest is obvious.

I would suggest alternatively using semantic versioning for frontend deployments. Minor deployments do not require a refresh (but suggest to the user that they might want to click refresh to get the latest and greatest, or cancel and keep doing what they were doing), major deployments put up a modal warning, requiring a refresh and also cut off all requests until refresh occurs. This provides an easy way to do hot-fixes during an event and get people to hit refresh overnight, and to distinguish between “if this user doesn’t refresh our system will suffer for it” and “we have a new version of the shuffle space interface and we think you’ll find it better, but it’s not obligatory that you refresh”.