Big Blue Button: Conference Security and "gatecrashers"

david_white
Community Novice

Howdy!

I am currently mentoring a group of faculty during their "unscheduled introduction to the Canvas Community." One of the big challenges we've faced is doing their "traditional" classes online, but the Conferences tool is a fantastic resource.

However, today, one of them emailed me to say that "some outside outfit" had gatecrashed his Conference and forced him to abandon the session.  I went in (with Teacher privileges) to investigate, but he had failed to record the session.

  1. Can users within a shell disguise their identities so that they do not display properly in the Public Chat window?
  2. Can users not enrolled in a shell participate in a BBB Conference, say by just getting the link?  
    • For that matter, is BBB still running on Flash, or did they finally go to HTML5?
  3. If a Conference was not recorded, is there any way for a Teacher/Designer to go in and retrieve Conference logs, or does that require Administrative-level intervention?

One of the reasons I prefer Conferences to Zoom or Webex is the lower likelihood of gatecrashers.  I hope this is still the case, and that one of the students was being a jerk (and, if we can retrieve the logs, we can deal with that student severely).

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