Issues with Assign Participant to Breakout Room

Hey @evgeny.balashov & team, wondering if you can offer any insight into some issues we’re having with the assignParticipantToBreakoutRoom API;

For context, we’re using assignParticipantToBreakoutRoom in conjunction with automaticallyMoveParticipantsIntoRooms: true to automatically move participants into specific breakout rooms programmatically.

Issues

1. When a participant is assigned to the main room (by omitting the uuid parameter), users are not moved automatically, and instead receive the following modal:

The host can already move participants into a breakout room programmatically without a prompt.

Why is a confirmation required when moving participants to the Main Room? Is there a way to disable this, or some other way to move participants to the Main Room without a confirmation?

We’re finding that this results in participants being in the wrong breakout rooms for a multitude of reasons; (1) participants don’t press “Join” (2) they don’t see the modal (3) they don’t understand what’s happening (4) they wish to continue their conversation

2. There is currently no way to assign participants to the Main Room or move them to “Unassigned”

How can we clear a participant’s breakout room assignment or assign them to the Main Room?

We expected calling assignParticipantToBreakoutRoom with no parameters to move the participant to the main room automatically and update their assignment to either the Main Room, or to Unassigned (as in #1, before any assignment was made).

This issue leaves us with no way for the host to move a participant into a breakout room that they’re currently assigned to.

I added some basic screenshots below of two breakout room lists with different view, but in both cases the meeting is effectively in the same state.

3. assignParticipantToBreakoutRoom must be called for every breakout room

Currently, we call the assignParticipantToBreakoutRoom API once for every participant in the meeting. We’re concerned that this architecture is will be unstable with many participants all moving themselves regularly.

Have you considered creating a method like assignParticipantToBreakoutRooms that takes an entire breakout room list including assignments for each room? This would make assigning every participant in the meeting much smoother!


Images

#1

In this image, I have created & opened the rooms and configured to move automatically. Nobody has been assigned.

#2

In this image, I firstly assigned Oli to Room 1, then assigned him back to the Main Room. As you can see, he is incorrectly still assigned to Room 1. We are wondering how best to “clear” this assignment (perhaps as described above?)

Hi Oliver,

Regarding 3: assignParticipantToBreakoutRoom must be called for every breakout room

We have considered a method for bulk assignment, but the challenge is that method could fail for different participants for different reasons. We have increased rate limit on this method to allow apps to call it many times and handle errors accurately

For 1 and 2, we are investigating the options to resolve it

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Hey @evgeny.balashov , any update on issue number 1? We see this happening a lot for larger events and participants are confused as to what to do.

If users are facilitated by API, can we not show any Zoom UI?

@evgeny.balashov Do you have any updates on the first point in the initial message?

We’re having a lot of issues during events where participants aren’t clicking the Zoom popup to move back to the main. When they don’t do that they get stuck in the rooms and our matchmaking sequencing gets out of order.

See image where myself and Brandon should be in the room, but Anh hasn’t left because she hasn’t confirmed the move back to main.

@taylorm Thanks for follow-up. Likely we will introduce a new setting to control this part of the behavior, it will take a few months.

@evgeny.balashov thanks for the response on this, I just submitted another Product Board request for this feature.

It’s a really high impact “bug” for our experience, as we automatically move people to Breakout Rooms and between Breakout Rooms but we cannot move them to the Main Session (Room?) automatically.

It often disrupts the twine app experience for participants because they do not see the modal, ignore it, click out of it, or hit “Not Now” because they don’t understand what it means or why it has appeared.

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@evgeny.balashov just wanted to bump this thread – it contains high priority bugs impacting the experience of our app.

We can’t automatically move participants from Main Room → Room 1 → Main Room → Room 1 for example!

Any chance you’ll be able to address this early in the year? :pray: