Improvement: do not show users error if room is already running

[tibroc]

Status Quo

When users click on "Start" when trying to start a room, sometimes it happens that already somebody else has started the room since loading the page. Then an error message is displayed to the user:

We make the experience that this message is not interesting to users and on the contrary confuses them. Usually they expect to start or join a meeting and do not care which one it is.

Suggestion

Do not show users the error message but handle this internally. If the room has not started yet, start it. If the room is already running, join. No need to show any messages.

[samuelwei]

Reason why currently solved as is: A user might want to adjust a room setting, save it and start. However if the room is started in the meantime, that setting might not have been applied (some settings are only applied during room start and do not effect running meetings).

These settings can also influence what users have to agree too before joining

[tibroc]

Then I would suggest to handle this differently and show a warning to the user when they are clicking on "save" in the settings menu if a meeting is currently already running.

The case that users want to join a room that started running after they loaded the page i would guess to be much more common. And in this case this warning modal is breaking the join-flow every time for those users.

[samuelwei]

Agree, that would be an alterative solution. Reminder: This applies to the streaming settings and files as well (also add warning there)

[lkiesow]

I see that @tibroc already created an issue for this 👍

I would like to chime in and mention that I've run into this several times now, when joining as a guest. That means that I can't change any setting which would be applied. Also looking at the error message, a non-technical user won't understand that changes to the room settings will not be applied based on the given error message which just tells you that the room cannot be created. Does that matter for the settings I just made? I already changed the settings, so the settings for already running rooms should have changed as well, shouldn't they? Obviously, that is not the case if you know how BBB works. But I don't think a non-technical user will know and understand that.

More than that, as a guest, I just get the name and login options again with an error that the room cannot be created. But I didn't want to create a room. Someone else sent me a room they created. I just wanted to join. That's why I clicked “join”. I didn't click create. Again, that PILOS creates the BBB room in the backend is very technical internal knowledge non-BBB-devs will not know.

pilos-parallel-join-error.mp4