Lobbies and sessions (Lobbys und Runden)

A Lobby is a room type for spontaneous voice rooms. Instead of joining one of the fixed voice rooms, anybody in the lobby starts their own short-lived voice room with one click – a session (German: Runde). A session lives while people are in it and disappears shortly after the last person has left. Communities use lobbies for gaming squads or a regulars' table, companies for breakouts, a coffee corner or a quick huddle.

Creating a lobby#

1. Click + next to the space name (you need the permission to create rooms).
2. Pick Lobby as the room type.
3. Enter a name (for example "Game Lobby" or "Breakouts"), choose the visibility and click Create room.

A lobby has no modules of its own. The sessions started in it get voice and chat. A space can have several lobbies.

The lobby dashboard#

In the sidebar a lobby is one entry – sessions never appear as separate entries, so the sidebar stays short however many sessions run. While sessions run, the right end of the entry shows who is in them:

• Green dot – at least one session has people in it.
• Avatars – up to four people from the sessions; with more, three avatars and +N. If the running sessions are still empty, only their number is shown.
• Magnifier with a number – this many sessions are looking for players.
• Your session – when you are in one of the lobby's sessions yourself, its name appears in small type under the entry. Click it to open the session. The lobby itself is highlighted then.

Sessions overview: hover over the entry with the mouse, tap the avatars (touch), or tab to the avatars and press Enter. A small window lists every running session – yours first – with its name, game, occupancy ("4/5"), Looking for players and the people in it, including the muted and deafened icons. Each session has the same button as its card (Join, Ask to join, Full …); Open lobby at the bottom leads to all cards. With many sessions the window scrolls, Esc closes it. "Is speaking" only shows there for your own session.

Clicking the lobby opens its dashboard:

• Header – the lobby's name, "4 active · 11 people" and, for admins, a gear that opens the lobby settings.
• Start bar – a name (optional), the size (Open or 2 to 25 people), the access (Anyone can join, On request, Invite only), a topic if the lobby offers topics, and the button Start a session. Coviqo creates the session and connects you to its voice right away. Without a name the session is called "Jamie's session" (German: "Runde von Jamie").
• Session cards – name, topic, "3/5", the people in it (in your own session a coloured ring shows who is speaking, a crown the leader), a lock for invite-only sessions or a hand for sessions on request, and the button Join, Ask to join, Requested, Full or You are here. An empty session fades on its card and then disappears.
• Fixed voice rooms – the space's regular voice rooms as small chips with their occupancy. A click joins.

A session that is published in Find players and still has room shows a green Looking for players badge – with 2 open when the session has a size – on its card and in its header. Click the badge on a card to join (or to ask to join). In the sidebar the magnifier with a number next to the lobby tells you how many of its sessions are looking for players. The green dot of the card and badge only pulses when your system does not ask for reduced motion.

You can have one session of your own per lobby. If you start a second one, Coviqo offers to take you to the one you already have. To prevent spam you can start at most one new session every 30 seconds.

Inside a session#

A session is a normal voice room: voice, screen sharing and (unless the lobby turned it off) chat. The header shows the lobby it belongs to – click the lobby's name to get back to the dashboard. The person who started the session is its leader. When the leader leaves, the person who has been in the session the longest takes over automatically.

The leader (and every admin or moderator of the lobby) finds Manage in the header:

• rename the session, pick a topic, change the size or the access,
• Invite members – they get a notice with Join,
• Remove somebody – they are disconnected and cannot come back into this session,
• Make leader – hand the leadership to somebody who is in the session,
• Close session – everybody is disconnected and the session is deleted.

On request: a request pops up for the leader with Accept and Decline (also in the session's header). The person asking sees Requested on the card and gets a notice with Join when accepted.

Invite only: only invited people (and whoever was already in the session when it was locked) can join.

Admins and moderators of the lobby (permission "Manage room") always see and enter every session and can close any of them.

Pulling people into a session: with Move members – or as the session's leader – you can move people into a session: Move to … in a person's menu lists the running sessions under their lobby (with "3/5"), or drag a person onto the lobby in the sidebar and pick the session in the small window. If the session is On request or Invite only and the person is not in yet, Coviqo asks first – moving them invites them into the session. People removed from the session cannot be moved back in.

Audio & video: the quality of all sessions (codec, audio profile, camera) is set once in the lobby's settings (Room settings › Lobby › Audio & video quality of the sessions) and applies at once, also in running sessions. In a session, Manage shows these values read-only with "Taken over from the lobby".

When sessions disappear#

An empty session is deleted after the lobby's delay – 30 seconds unless the admins changed it (0 to 600 seconds). A session nobody has joined yet waits at least one minute. Its chat and files are deleted with it. Sessions cannot be recorded, so there are no recordings to keep.

Lobby settings (admins)#

Open the gear on the dashboard or Room settings › Lobby:

Sessions inherit the lobby's permissions: whoever can see and enter the lobby can see its sessions. If the space runs the AutoMod bot, its word filter also applies to session names and topics.

Plan limits#

How many sessions may run at the same time in a space depends on the plan: Free 5, Community Pro 50, Business 200, Enterprise unlimited. Sessions do not count as rooms.

Finding players from other communities#

The leader of a session can publish it in Find players so that people from other communities can ask to join – if the space has switched on Sessions publicly discoverable. See Find players (Mitspieler finden).