We currently use the events and livestream plugins to run educational content in our community. We’re currently embedding a Teams Townhall event and hiding it behind users RSVPing for an event. Viewers use the Discourse chat to engage and ask questions. It feels very janky, so I hope to pick your brain on what works for your community.
In a former community, we used Streamyard to perform more of a polished show, which worked much better (albeit more work to execute too).
I noticed that Discourse themselves don’t use the Event/Livestream route and just offload everything through a sign-up for and Zoom.
Expand to hear my frustrations with our current method
- Gating the player behind [hidden] is not 100% reliable. To the point, I have to say “if you do not see the player, un-RSVP and re-RSVP”. Occasionally, users also fail to join the chat channel. This seems to impact users who RSVP’d long ago and show up with the Going status already. It is not great to advertise a known bug along with our marketing material.
- Re: MS Teams specifically, in my testing, the Townhall format was bugged if the event wasn’t live yet. It would still say “the event hasn’t started yet”. I recall it needing to refresh the page for the stream to recognize the event was live.
- It’s likely due to our corporate settings, but the Teams embed will request permissions to the viewer’s mic and camera even though audience participation is turned off in Teams.