Presenters are pulled to backstage without warning or consent

[amyjko]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Clowdr is highly aggressive about automatically pulling people into backstages, regardless of where they are on the conference website or what they are doing. It is the equivalent of a conference organizer walking into a room with an active conversation, dragging a presenter out of the room, and telling them to go backstage. This would be highly inappropriate of course, but Clowdr does it all the time, leading to abruptly ended conversations, interrupted reading, and a jarring disorientation.

Describe the solution you'd like
Rather than automatically forcing a presenter to the backstage page, there should be a persistent popup that says something like "You're required in the back stage. Click here to join." When the presenter is ready, they will click and join. They'll have a variety of reasons to not join immediately, and should be trusted to decide when it would be reasonable to join. This design would allow presenters to finish the conversation they are having in other rooms, finish reading, or finish a thought before navigating to backstage.

[rossng]

This behaviour is actually one of the oldest parts of Clowdr! We believed at the time that it was much more important to make sure presenters got into their backstage in good time than to give them choices about the experience.

I can see that this issue is particularly noticeable for conference organisers and chairs who are added to lots of events.

I think you've probably seen the 'continuations' feature in Clowdr, where users are given options about 'where to go next'. I wonder if perhaps this could be used for backstages, with a default choice of 'take me to the backstage in 30s' unless the user opts out.

[amyjko]

It's hard to see any good argument for Clowdr being in charge of where a participant is. The participant always knows better than Clowdr if it would be appropriate to leave a conversation. Clowdr's heuristic of "it is always more important for a presenter to be in the backstage at this very moment" is almost always wrong, because the presenter is almost always doing some other important thing. With a reminder, they can decide for themselves when to go to the backstage: immediately, after they finish a point in a conversation, after they finish reassuring a distraught student, after they get that last question in at a poster, etc. I see no downside to a highly prominent, window-wide animated banner at the top that says "You're needed backstage". Trust the humans, they know better :)