Re: [107attendees] Where the action is, at virtual meetings ...

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Mar 27, 2020, at 1:10 PM, Carrick Bartle <[e-mail]> wrote:
> What do you mean by "point and click”?

I mean that when you click on the light bulb icon in the agenda, it pulls up a new tab in your browser that contains the chat session for the meeting.

Right now, on my iPad or Mac, clicking on that link brings up a fairly random app that I guess claims to serve the jabber:// <jabber://> protocol but in fact does nothing.  I installed three different apps before I found one that actually worked (many thanks to Glen Barney for putting up the informational page on this, BTW).  The one that worked provided no feedback when I entered [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]> where it expected “meeting” and accepted the default jabber server where I should have typed jabber.ietf.org <http://jabber.ietf.org/>.  At this point I gave up and didn’t try again until the next meeting, when I finally had a brainstorm that turned out to be correct as to what to type.  The UI gave me no clue that there was a problem—I simply wasn’t in the jabber room and didn’t see the conversation.

This is a total usability fail.  Only people who really, really want to use Jabber, or who have been using it for years and understand it well, will be able to make it work.   I think that’s why a relatively limited number of people participated on jabber as compared to webex, where in order to join I just clicked on the URL and was immediately in the meeting room.