On 2020-05-14 13:17:53 -0700 (-0700), Clark Boylan wrote:
On Thu, May 14, 2020, at 10:42 AM, Chris Morgan wrote: [...]
- etherpad integration is cool but several of us found the window seemed to disappear inexplicably
It seems that when a call starts the etherpad starts "pinned" but then certain events can cause jitsi to go back to its normal "focus on the person talking" mode of operation. In the bottom right is a "3 dot" menu and from there you can open and close the "shared document" this allows you to toggle the etherpad manually.
Even after toggling it directly it seems that jitsi wants to keep focus on speakers in some cases. I've been fiddling with it to try and understand that better and it seems like some of these things may help (though I can't say for sure):
* Click in the document directly
* Collapse the right hand column of mini webcams using the > in the bottom right
Even doing these, I found that at times it would switch back to an active speaker faster than I could click in the pad after redisplaying.
- colored highlighting of fragments on the etherpad showed up overlapped for some but not all meeting members, obscuring some text
I've noticed this too. Toggling authorship colors in etherpad's settings menu seems to correct this. [...]
Temporarily at least, though it does seem to recur. Also this is a local setting, it does not alter how other users see the pad (it's only changing the author colors setting for your view of the pad). Leaving author colors off may work around it, though at a loss of that feature of course.
* Chrome/Chromium seem more reliable than Firefox
At least that's how it was for me when I tried it. I normally use FF (76 at present) and so have it configured for incognito mode always, all sorts of possible snooping avenues disabled in preferences, and several security/privacy-oriented extensions for blocking unwanted content and access. Things worked well for me in Chromium (81), but that may be because it's on default settings with no extensions. It's quite possible FireFox works just fine for this, as long as it's not configured by a paranoid nutcase like me. FF kept showing my camera footage to me, and seemed to be picking up my microphone and outputting to my speakers, but did not send or receive any video or audio streams over the network whatsoever. I'll likely stick with Chromium for meetpad use (and use it only for that), as it provides me a nice privacy buffer from all my other browsing by being an entirely separate application.
I think we are ready for people to use it understanding its a new service we are trying to run and there may be hiccups. In particular I don't think we've been able to do any serious scale testing yet. If you are using it and find those limits we'd love to hear about it. Also feedback like what you posted above is great too. [...]
I think Kendall Nelson is planning to use it as part of the community release celebration later today, so hopefully we'll get a bit more scale testing that way. -- Jeremy Stanley