Hi Paul,
You can see details on the various support options (including commerical hosting) at
http://www.bigbluebutton.org/support/
Regards,... Fred
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BigBlueButton Developer
Fred, one of your links is http://hostbbb.com/.
I used their $10/ month service to host a meeting for 9 students. They have a really old version of BBB (0.6) that needs to be updated. That version has many bugs:
- Students sometimes get duplicated on log in.
- Students getting dropped from the session.
- Poor audio quality compared to Skype.
- Poor screen sharing compared to join.me
In addition, their admin has interupted my sessions with jokes. So I can't really recommend them.
Hi Jeremy,
The bugs which you noticed in (1) and (2) are with BigBlueButton itself and we (the core developers) take responsibility for them, the bugs are not with hostbbb.com. If your server is running an older version, we recommend you contact them directly.
For (3), the audio quality is our responsibility as BigBlueButton developers. The audio quality is also a result of the server CPU (if it's overloaded), and, most importantly, a result of the bandwidth from users to the server. Also, skype is a peer to peer networking architecture, and it is going to give you the best audio possible between two people. BigBlueButton is a server-centric architecture that can record and playback classes, and support dozens of simulanteous students. It's a different architecture that uses TCP instead of UDP (a limitation of Flash), and you will have a variable experience in audio depending on your network. For more information, see our FAQ
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/FAQ#Some_users_are_experiencing_audio_problems
For (4), again, this is our responsiblity for the speed of screen sharing. Like audio, it's heavily affected by network bandwidth. Unlike join.me, your users do not have to install any software. We're working on improving the speed of desktp sharing in 0.81, which is in development.
Regards,... Fred
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BigBlueButton Developer
Jeremy, just saw this post a little late... you were not using the moodle interface, and yes were on the old .71 Feb 2011 server which is not representative of current BBB capabilities in anyway.
Since you were using wordpress, and only had one password for students you were had by one of them
Once of your students simply opened another tab, used a name like admin and logged in to disrupt your class with jokes using the common password.
These were AP computer science students right
We host many dedicated servers for colleges, and like Fred said some other real good options in bigbluebutton site for commercial support exist.
You should really try out the .81 version.
Using the moodle plugin allows you to fully control authentication, and record and playback is fully supported.
Regards,
Stephen