Make recording of a session optional - Fix #1163

[yanosz]

Fix #1163 by making recording configurable

By this PR, recording is among the room-features configured in the sample env. Due to its privacy implications, it has to be enabled explicitly. In addition, the administator can configure recording-options using the frontend. Unless enabled explicitly, rooms are not recoreded. Note: This changes default behaviour.

If enabled, users can configure rooms to record session. This flag is set on a per-room basis and cannot be changed while the room is active (i.e. a session is running)

[coveralls]

Coverage decreased (-0.03%) to 91.226% when pulling 0314762 on yanosz:master+1163 into 9a96df6 on bigbluebutton:v2.7-alpha.

[Arnei]

Hello,
Is this sketch already intended to be working? I ask because I tried this pull request, but it does not work for me. To be more specific, the new "Recording" room setting does not seem to have an effect on whether recording files are created by bigbluebutton or not (for example, files are created in /var/bigbluebutton/recording/raw no matter the setting). Or did I get something wrong?

[yanosz]

Hello,
Is this sketch already intended to be working? I ask because I tried this pull request, but it does not work for me. To be more specific, the new "Recording" room setting does not seem to have an effect on whether recording files are created by bigbluebutton or not (for example, files are created in /var/bigbluebutton/recording/raw no matter the setting). Or did I get something wrong?

Heiho,

thanks for feedback and testing! Initially, I planed to do some testing, based on changes caused by #1222 and revisit this at this coming point in time. Basically, this patch was about prototyping the UX according to greenlight's architecture. It's my first PR for greenlight, anyway :-).

Nevertheless, I can do some debugging in case sbd. (@Arnei you?) is interested in using this patch as of now.

[yanosz]

ok, CI is happy, parameters should be passed

[Arnei]

Ah, makes sense that it wouldn't prevent recording if it was just a UX prototype :D.

I've tried the newest commit, as it is labeled "pass parameter on creation", and now bigbluebutton won't create any archive files under /var/bigbluebutton/recording/rawno matter if the recording option was set to true or false on creation.

And thank you for working on this!

[zner0L]

@yanosz or anyone, can you tell me what's missing from this to be merged? I really need to be able to disable recordings, but if possible I would like to wait for a release before using these changes, but if it takes long I'll just patch it myself…

[yanosz]

@zner0L Hard to say. There isn't much feedback from the maintainers, yet. I guess, that a fair amount of new comitters rushed into this project in the last days and things could take time.

I'd helpfull if you coud test the branch as of this PR, as of now and provide some feedback.

[farhatahmad]

Hi @yanosz,

Thanks for submitting the PR. The reason I haven't replied is because I'm still unsure with exactly how this should work. We haven't had the time internally to discuss this yet so I can't quite give a deadline on when this will be merged

[yanosz]

Hei @farhatahmad

Thanks for submitting the PR. The reason I haven't replied is because I'm still unsure with exactly how this should work. We haven't had the time internally to discuss this yet so I can't quite give a deadline on when this will be merged

Thanks your time and answer! I'm also unsure, with exactly how this should work. In essence, greenlight promotes custimization, whereby regional peculiarities (such as the GDBR) can be with implemented very low effort. Nevertheless, the demand in #1163 appears to be sound. Also, I'm thinking, hat neither the architecture of greenlight, nor the UX for users and nor the complexity for customizers can reasonable address evovled, but local requirements such as GDPR-compliance, for certain. Should greenlight - as a project - implement various business use-cases and requirements or should it stay a minimalist appraoch for a bbb frontend, whereby other frontends exists for diverse use-cases? I'm not certain.

That being said, I'm also not certain, if GDPR-compliance actuallually justifies a fork of greenlight.

For the moment, it appears to reasonable to me to maintain this branch of greenlight and ask for testers.

[gilou]

I might give it a go indeed, for legal and technical reasons, not enabling the recording by default is very important!

[Arnei]

Seems to be working mighty fine so far. Thanks again!

Things I found:

1. 
   "Session Active" is displayed on room creation. It's not doing any harm, just confusing. Otherwise, "Session Active" is displayed correctly.

[yanosz]

@Arnei Thanks for your feedback. I'll have a look at it this weekend.

[Arnei]

Got another bug report:

Usually, when you try to join a conference that has not started yet, you get a message looking like so (I hope the german has no detrimental effect on the explanatory power of the image):

If I try to do the same thing in a room with recording enabled, after consenting, entering my name and clicking join, the consent button is displayed again:

The consent button will then stop doing anything useful, while the message "the conference hasn't started yet" won't ever be displayed. The message is hidden away in the span(28657ab#diff-9b2eed259771c1646a45c3e0ce623dfaR43).

[yanosz]

@Arnei thanks for your feedback. I guess, that this is an interesting side effect of unstable DOM manipulations.

I think I'll ditch the cosent-button as explained in #1163 and have GDPR-related consent issues in #1619

[yanosz]

I think, that this feature is ready for getting merged (sorry, for not marking this PR as draft before, I just discovered this functionality).

i'd be good to have some addtional, manual testing. To the best of my knowledge, there is no test automation for both the modal dialogs and the joiner aspect.

@basisbit: Ping.

[basisbit]

@farhatahmad any chance to get this reviewed and merged soon-ish? About all BBB server providers who use Greenliight and need the recording feature in the EU are currently waiting for this to get merged (because of legal requirements) and so far have to manually patch every new release of greenlight.

Also, please take a look at how many people upvoted this issue.

[yanosz]

Sorry for the spam ... I'was just trying to align the whitespace, when origins got messed up. It should be fine, again.

[basisbit]

yet another week without any reaction, not even a comment. nudge @farhatahmad ?

[farhatahmad]

@basisbit No need for the attitude :). My comment is the same as it's been since this topic was first brought up. You were also on the call last week when I mentioned that I plan to fully review and merge it into the next version of Greenlight (v2.7).

I've been focused on making v2.6.x stable due to the big changes that were made in that version. Would you prefer I leave the bugs and focus solely on this issue?

@yanosz I appreciate all the work you and everyone else put in to get this PR to the state it is now. I still plan on merging this once I can confirm the v2.6.x is stable enough so that I can begin working on v2.7

[matiasilva]

Great work, as always :)

[ichdasich]

I think the last item is for enabling that setting in the room configuration tab, no?

[farhatahmad]

Made some small changes/improvements in #1851. Feel free to let me know what you guys think :)

[sondos1992]

Hi
I've a question can i add automatic recording and download feature to BBB .

[basisbit]

@sondos1992 for support requests / such questions, please ask at the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bigbluebutton-users

[sondos1992]

it keep showing error #254 connection to server can't join

[basisbit]

@sondos1992 for support requests / such questions, please ask at the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bigbluebutton-greenlight