GotoWebinar randomly muting panellists

[Simone1]

Hello,

In my webinar last week, GotoWebinar seemed to have gone a bit rogue.

At one point it would start muting my panellists as if an organiser had muted them, so they could not unmute themselves (and neither myself nor the other organiser were muting our panelists) - which was a bit disrupting as the panellists had to keep requesting to be unmuted by the organisers.

It also seemed to have tried to start my webcam and the camera of one of the panellists - and again none of us were taking these actions (we were not using webcams at all for this webinar). This took me a little bit to realise, as my screen had frozen for a bit (which may have had nothing to do with GtW, it could just have been an internet connection issue).

So it looks like there was something a bit odd going on with the controls. 

I have used GtW for many years now and have never seen this happen before.

Has anyone ever experienced something similar, and has any suggestions to prevent this happening again?

Grateful for any advice that can be shared!

[Chris Droessler]

I have seen the same issue of random muting of Panelists over the past few months. It is as if an Organizer has muted them, but I did not.

[AshC]

Hey there,

Random muting of staff members is certainly not an expected GoToWebinar integrated audio behavior.

It sounds like you are experienced with GoToWebinar already, though I'd still like to bring up the Organizer options on the control panel and phone key-pad that mutes all participants simultaneously.  If you're sure this is not happening, and don't have any Co-Organizers that might accidentally be doing this, then we'd like to file an audio escalation through Customer Support within a 24 hour window of the event, for the purposes of tracking any audio commands to or from your staff members. 

https://support.goto.com/webinar/help/how-do-i-contact-gotowebinar-customer-support-g2w090151 

[Simone1]

Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

No, it was definitely not a case of the panellists being accidentally muted by the organisers or co-organisers (and not the phone key-pad being pressed by mistake either).

It's now over 24h after the event when this happened, so I'm not sure it is still possible to do what you are suggesting.

Is there any other way you can investigate this, or can I still raise an audio escalation ticket ?

I wouldn't like to wait for the next webinar to see if this happens again.

Also, it looks like I am not the only person experiencing this; wouldn't there be a way you could investigate the issue from your side as the  providers of the platform, without waiting for it to happen again to account holders?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

[AshC]

I'm sorry, Simone, there are no known causes of this behavior.  If we can recreate the problem internally then we can certainly investigate further, though we've been unsuccessful so far when this is reported by customers.

[StateTraining]

We had this happen last week in a very large summit I was organizing. Unfortunately, the individual that was randomly being muted was the Director of our agency. Needless to say, I'm having to really fight to continue to use GoToWebinar. I really hope that they don't dismiss this bug and look into it further. 

[AshC]

@StateTraining  If you can gather any info about their system / hardware setup, it would help us try to recreate the issue internally:  Operating System, VoIP Vs. Telephone, audio hardware such as headset or mobile device

[Simone1]

@AshC

I imagine that if I get this information to you, you could investigate it in my case as well?

I'm a bit confused as when I raised the issue you just said you could not look into it, but when @StateTraining mentioned the same you asked for more information to investigate the problem.

In any case, I've asked my panellists about their system / hardware setup, and will let you know when they get back to me.

@StateTraining  - that is indeed unfortunate! I hope this can be investigated and sorted out soon, before it happens again. Thanks for sharing your experience with the same issue.

[AshC]

@Simone1  The details of the presenter and webinar schedule will help show common environmental factors, but we start to lose telephone records after the 24 hour period as telecoms delete the information thereafter.

[Simone1]

@AshC 

These are the details of one of my panellists set-up:

Operating system – I was using a Lenovo windows laptop and I would have accessed the webinar on either Chrome or Firefox (I can’t remember which I used!)

I used VoIP with a Logitech headset.

The other 2 had exactly the same laptop/Windows 10 on it, and were using headsets - none was using a phone.

If I get more detail I will let you know, but I hope with this above you can start looking into the issue?

Looking forward to hear back from you.