Update: Secure video conferences at mailbox.org now to feature moderator role

The success of a video conference often depends on the communication skills of the session moderator. This special user has a central, important role in providing guidance to the participants about the structure of the session. In turn, the success of the moderator also depends on the technical means they can use to control certain aspects of the session.

All existing and newly set-up secure video conference rooms at mailbox.org can now use the moderator role. Existing rooms will receive an automatically generated moderator password. This can of course be changed by the account user, as required.

The new moderator feature at a glance:

• Password-protected moderator role
• Mute selected or all participants in the room
• Remove participants from the room

Especially useful for large video conferences

While access to a video conference is normally possible through a link that can be publicly shared among participants, the moderator uses a private password that is only known to the organizer of the session. This is because the moderator can access special features to mute participants, or even remove them from the session, if necessary.

These features are useful especially in sessions with many participants and also for remote schooling via video conference, where the teacher or a teaching assistant will normally take the moderator role. As many will know, there is always that someone in the session who shares an annoying background noise with everyone else because they didn’t mute their microphone, and it takes a while before they notice... With the new moderator role, this is now no longer an issue.

Secure and fit for everyday use

In our consultations with the data protection authorities in Berlin, we were asked to provide an option that enforces randomly generated passwords for our video conferencing system. Not having this raised concerns about the possibility that many users might choose and even reuse passwords for their individual conference rooms that are overly simplistic and easy to guess. We have implemented this solution, although with an additional usability safeguard in place: Strong passwords will be generated for any newly created video conference rooms, and this will help protect our users against abuse and unauthorized access. However, any organizer can change the password manually after a room has been created, simply because there are some scenarios where offering the same password to several users may be necessary.