J Sherwani (Pop Team): Oh, good idea. Yes, I will try that. Thanks!

J Sherwani (Pop Team): Excited for the rooms feature! Evaluated a few video collaboration tools today we're deciding to go with Screen. This was one of the features that stood out to me as something we'll miss by going with Screen over Tandem.

J Sherwani (Pop Team): This is extremely fragile state-wise, because it appears that a variety of disconnect bugs in screen that come and go as you fix them cause the perpetual meeting to end, even though its still on everyone's calendar, also it appears that if you cancel ONE meet of the scheduled, screen cancels all of them

As a veteran programmer, I know you probably have a very good architectural limitation that's preventing re-using a meeting ID, but the existing system is way way way way way too fragile to consider "long term schedule meetings" a remotely viable workaround

More often that not, for what appears a variety of reasons (long tail problem), the long term meetings end up ENDING too, long before they are removed from calendars, usually they only last 3 days to a couple weeks for our 5 person team.

Without seeing your code, but thinking of several different ways you might be architected backend-frontend-wise, can I suggest a thing you can probably implement on your end to help tide us over until you finish whatever amazing "correct and perfect solution" you are no doubt excited about?

Joseph Valenti: I should mention that we have given up on perpetual meetings, after them really not succesfully surviving more than a week int he real world, because you have to book them FROM SCREEN (yuck!), everytime the meeting link "dies" due to another issue, we have to delete the meeting, and create a new one from scratch, and send new cal invites to everyone, which is VERY embarassing for those of us advocating screen.

Screen is a HUGE big-O improvement in team UX, and it is worth all the bugs etc to get the big-O, but its very hard as a strident screen advocate to keep pointing out that the frequent flakiness is worth enduring (and I'd say 50% of the flakiness for us is interactions with this perpetual workaround, and 25% was resolved with the recent-ish major new release, so THANK YOU SO MUCH AMAZING).

As a tech lead, I am 150% positive that the structural, team, and UX gains from screen wrt to collab 500% outweigh the daily-flakiness problem, but I will admit, I feel like I have egg on my face, and I'm dragging a few of the not-big-picture jr engineers kicking and screaming due to this. I can only say that because I believe so much in the brilliance of screen that I know you won't take this as a diss ;-)

Joseph Valenti So I bet 4/5 the following short term workaround is viable in the screen codebase, and will remove the short term user problems with perpetual meetings:

1) Fine, there's an architectural limitation that requires meetings to "end" and the same meeting ID can't just connect people forever. I get it.

2) Come up with a simple+standard way of re-hashing the existing meeting ID (e.g. if they are currently random, just increment by 1 or 7 or whatever), and provide a frontend-only-required REDIRECT to everyone who visits the old meeting link to whatever the new one is. As meetings expire so quickly, really long used URLs could end up with a pretty long redirect chain, but while that's ugly it would stop user damage with a fix that I suspect would NOT pollute the long term architecture.

Thoughts?

Seth Nickell: Thank you for your incredibly, incredibly helpful and detailed feedback. I have shared your multiple posts with our entire team (we're now 5 people), and I think you've really outlined some glaring issues that we need to fix.

To be 100% transparent, scheduled meetings have been a "developmental backwater" (I had to Google to find https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/101275/what-is-a-more-politically-correct-way-to-call-something-a-red-headed-step-chil) that we need to fix, and your detailed feedback is a wake-up call to us to realize that.

I'll take a bit of time to go through everything you've said, and will give you a detailed response soon, but I just wanted to send you a thank you before I break for the weekend.

Seth Nickell: As a temporary workaround, we could make a simple fix which is to never end meetings, until we get our act together. This should unblock you instantly.

However, the problem with this is that we will eventually run out of meeting IDs (with the current xxx-xxx-xxx format, we have 1B meeting IDs). Also, for Slack users, seeing a meeting that's perpetually running would feel odd (although we can counteract this by letting Slack know the meeting's ended, while still allowing new joiners to reopen it).

Ideally, however, we'd like to fix the issues you're coming up against. If I understand correctly, canceling any one of them cancels the entire meeting (we're looking into that). Are there any other cases where it seems like meetings are randomly ending? We use this feature internally for our standing meetings and haven't seen any issue. But we also hadn't ever canceled an instance of those meetings, and I'm wondering if there are other flows we need to be testing more thoroughly. If you have any insights here, please let me know.

Having said all of this, if the fix sounds like it would improve your use of Screen significantly, we can work on getting that out asap, while we figure out the larger issues (if there are any beyond the cancelation bug, which we are looking into). Thanks again for the detailed feedback!

Seth Nickell: Hi Seth. I am responsible for the google calendar integration, so firstly, apologies about the issues you’re seeing! We’re working to add additional debugging around how calendar events are handled, specifically recurring event instances.

You wrote that meetings continue to exist in Google calendar but when you try to join them, the meeting room has ended. Can you confirm if the meeting in question is displayed in in Screen, or has it disappeared from the app altogether? Would you have a link to a meeting room that ended while it was still in your Google calendar?

Additionally, the issue where cancelling a single event instance cancels all events (i.e: Screen doesn’t update to show the next recurring event instance) — is this something you can replicate easily, or have you noticed it happening randomly?

Finally, a request: would it possible for you to create a scheduled meeting and send an invitation to mustafa@screen.so? Please set the recurrence to how you have it for other meetings that eventually end when they shouldn’t.

Thank you — hoping to resolve this ASAP for everyone.