This article will show you the different capabilities of moderating the audience and engagement options
Whether it is the presenters themselves or someone else that is designated to do so, moderation is an important aspect of live webinars and events. Everything from curating the chat and Q&A responses to kicking and banning bad actors to managing which presenter is on screen, BigMarker provides many controls to give you full control of your audience and presenters.
Moderating the audience
With BigMarker you can have total control of how your audience engages with your live sessions, and gives you the tools to deal with users who start to take away from the experience you want to curate.
Settings to configure before your webinar starts
To avoid having to micromanage every message and question that the audience provides, you can use a number of different features and settings that will help moderate the audience content.
Spam Protection
In every live webinar dashboard you will find settings for Spam Protection. Here you will be able to add words or phrases to the Spam Protection list, as well as set how many offenses are needed in order for someone to be muted.
If someone uses one of these words or phrases, the chat comment will be hidden from the other members of the audience, but it will still show up for presenters and admins. Those users will see the message highlighted in the public chat, allowing the message to be easily found and the user dealt with.
If the user triggers the Spam Protection enough times to reach the limit, then none of their messages will reach the rest of the audience, and all of them will also be highlighted for presenters in the same manner.
Engagement Settings
On the main page of the webinar dashboard, you have a number of settings that let you control what features and options are available in the chat panel inside of the webinar room. Depending on the needs and flow of your session, here is a non-exhaustive list of the settings you may want to update:
- Show Attendee List - Shows the list of attendees to other attendees, thus allowing for private chats between them.
- Enable Q&A - Determines whether the Q&A tab is seen by anyone in the webinar room.
- Q&A Auto-publish - Determines if a question is automatically published
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Private chat with presenters - Allows attendees to send private messages to presenters
Managing attendees and settings when the webinar is live
Once the webinar is live, all of the settings that were mentioned in the previous section will be available as part of the Studio control panel. Additionally, you have many options for managing each individual attendee as well as each message they send.
In the list of registrants, you have a few options when you click on someone's name. If someone is having issues you'll get a quick glance of their computer and network speed, which will be useful for troubleshooting and support.
Additionally there is a 3-dot menu next to all registrants, and in here you have options to promote attendees to presenters, as well as remove them from the live room or ban them completely. When a user is banned they are still registered, but will but unable to reenter the webinar room.
Managing incoming messages and questions
In the engagement panel, each message or question that comes in has a number of options available. For chat, just hover over any message to expose the 3-dot menu for these additional settings:
In this menu, you can:
- Convert the message to a question for Q&A - Changes the chat message into an unanswered incoming question
- Pin the chat message to make it the new sticky message
- Delete the message
- Remove the user from the live room - Brings the user to the Exit URL
- Ban the user - Removes the user and they are unable to return using the same email address
- Hide all chats - this performs the same function as what happens when the Spam Protection limit is reached
Additional links and resources
There are even more capabilities you have as a moderator or presenter in the live webinar room, and those features are covered in the pages below: