What's New in BigBlueButton 3.0.9

Version 3.0.9 is a maintenance release that brings several client and server-side fixes. Key highlights include the ability to filter specific emojis in chat, improved external video synchronization, accessibility enhancements, and updates to the recording and playback pipeline.

HTML5 Client Improvements

  • Emoji filtering: The chat now respects the disableEmojis setting, filtering out unallowed emojis from search results. The emoji picker can also be disabled via disabledFeatures.
  • External video sync fixes: Resolved issues where the external video would unsync when the presenter resumes a session and when seeking on the player.
  • Accessibility: Poll chat messages are now accessible for screen readers, and the polling modal is placed at the end of the DOM tree for better screen reader flow.
  • Reactions: Fixed a bug where clearing all reactions did not work properly.
  • Chat and whiteboard: Fixed an issue where marking messages as seen failed on Safari. Corrected the base zoom value for the whiteboard to prevent desync.
  • Smart slides: Poll options from smart slides are no longer removed when editing custom input.
  • Audio captions: Added a check for Speech Recognition API support before accessing voices.
  • UI data: Refactored the ui-data-getter and ui-data components for improved performance and maintainability.

Core and Server Fixes

  • Placeholder replacements: The bbb-web component now supports placeholder replacements for pluginManifests URLs, making it easier to configure plugins.
  • Logging: Improved logs for user lock messages in akka-bbb-apps. The gql-middleware now provides more details about WebSocket disconnections from browsers and Hasura.
  • URL encoding: The presentation name is now properly URL-encoded when uploaded.
  • Screen sharing: Added a ParticipantStatusChange event for screen sharing status updates.
  • Reintroduced the meta_hack-record-viewer-video setting for cases where recording viewer video is needed.

Recording and Playback Updates

Several playback dependencies were bumped for stability and bug fixes:

  • Bumped bbb-playback to version 5.3.5, incorporating fixes from previous versions (5.3.2, 5.3.3, 5.3.4).
  • Updated the record-and-playback version to 3.0.9 to match the release.

Packaging and Configuration

  • LiveKit: Upgraded to livekit-server v1.9.0, now built from source for better maintainability.
  • Log rotation: Compressed rotated logs for bbb-*-akka and bbb-web to save disk space.
  • Added publiccode.yml for public administrations directories, with missing info fields filled in.
  • Tomcat: Bumped tomcatEmbed to version 9.0.105.

Plugin SDK Updates

  • Fixed several typos in the PlugIn SDK to improve development experience.

This release also includes updates to translations via Transifex for multiple languages (Persian, Italian, Chinese Traditional, Arabic, Japanese, Hungarian, German, Greek, Estonian). A full list of changes can be found in the GitHub release page.