BigBlueButton 3.0.0 released!!!

[Anton Georgiev]

This is the official release of BigBlueButton 3.0, the culmination of over 18 months of development, 4496 commits, 7 alpha, 7 beta, and 4 release candidates.

This is a major release of BigBlueButton and contains multiple new and improved features

• Support for plugins to extend the functionality of the core
• Improved chat with editing, adding emojis, and follow-up messages
• Improved whiteboard a build of tldraw 2.0
• Join audio with microphone (able to configure no more listen-only/microphone)
• Improved Away mode (one click to set away)
• Push to talk

Initial (experimental) support was added for

• Integration with LiveKit for audio, webcams and screen share
• Infinite whiteboard
• Support for ClamAV as presentation file scanner

This release includes significant refactor of the code base and re-envisioning the architecture of the client and the components supporting it. Specifically, we removed all of mongo and meteor and replaced it with Hasura and GraphQL communication. This restructuring enabled optimization of the user list, chat, and all other communications, which resulted in improved stability and performance.

We also updated all the components so BigBlueButton 3.0 installs on Ubuntu 22.04.

Link to the installation command / instructions/ full list of features: https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/3.0/new-features/

The focus of BigBlueButton

When we created BigBlueButton in 2007, we created it with the mission to build the world's most effective virtual classroom measured in learning outcomes.

We created it to empower educators with built-in tools for active learning and live analytics to ensure every student learns.

In line with UN Sustainable Development Goal # 4: Quality Education for Everyone, we believe every student in the world deserves a high quality online learning experience. And we believe every educator deserves the best platform to provide it.

Also, as an open-source platform, BigBlueButton is freely available worldwide. If you are in education and teach students in live sessions, we built BigBlueButton for you.

As we evolve BigBlueButton 3.0, the new plug-in architecture enables the product to be used in other areas of communication. At the core, BigBlueButton 3.0 is an extensible platform with all the core collaboration features you would find in a commercial web conferencing system.

Thanks to our Community

The BigBlueButton project is supported by a world-wide community of developers, teachers, testers, and government, commercial, and educational organizations.

For this release, we want to thank in particular the following organizations.

We thank ZKI, the German association of Higher Education IT centers, for its members that have collectively supported the overall development for this release. Notably, sponsoring the integration of LiveKit into BigBlueButton. We also thank the German Universities that have tested earlier builds of this release and given feedback and helped improve the overall quality of this release.

We thank the French Ministry of Education who have supported the development of features in this release, including being able to edit, delete, reply to and react to a chat message.

We thank the many translators who helped ensure that BigBlueButton is localized.

Big THANK YOU to all community members who helped for this release -
both through sending pull requests and through reporting bugs or requesting enhancements! 🎊

---
Link to installation command / instructions/ features:
https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/3.0/new-features

The full release notes are here
https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/releases/tag/v3.0.0

To try out 3.0.0, visit
https://demo.bigbluebutton.org/

If you want to report any potential security issues with BigBlueButton, please check https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/security/policy#reporting-a-vulnerability

As always, we welcome feedback on this latest update.
Anton and team

[Martin Thomas Schrott]

Hi and thanks for the new release

I am a bit disappointed because a lot of the fixes Daniel and I did for the accessibility are missing in the release.

I hope they will be included in the next minor bugfix soon.

here a short list (just did a quick review):

bbb 3.0 bugs

* on entering a room the welcome message dialog is not focused - screenreader users may be confused. the focus should be placed within the welcome dialog.
* the accessibility header for the chat is still missing.
* the memberlist fixes are missing (still unlabeled and doubled buttons)
* the chat fixes for accessibility are not included (no intuitive list, unlabeled buttons ...)
* the fixes in the action menue bar are missing still unlabeled and doubled buttons

cheers

Martin

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[Anton Georgiev]

Hi Martin,

Thank you for your help, and for this report. We merged all but one of Daniel's pull requests and made additional changes too. I will make sure https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/pull/22151 will get its conflicts resolved and will find its way to BBB 3.0.1.

Thank you again!

Anton

[davorb...@gmail.com]

Hmm, why was the undo button removed from tldraw v2? My teachers found it incredibly useful. Now, having to erase or select and delete takes more time for them. Looks like official tldraw has this option:

[Anton Georgiev]

Hi!

Rather than having several different menus which cover parts of the slide, we opted to hide the undo/redo/delete etc menus but to ensure that the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+Z for undo, Ctrl+Shift+Z to redo.

For mobile we added gestures 

Two-finger tap for undo.
Three-finger tap for redo.

Could you please give it a try and let us know how it went? The whiteboard tools are even more powerful when using the shortcuts for them. Hover over the toolbar to see the shortcuts ( h, e, v, and so on).

I hope this helps!

Anton

[Lutice (geeZot)]

Hi Anton,

But sometimes the whiteboard is used on numeric whiteboard with electronic pen ;-) in this case it's easier to click on icon ... there is no shortcut or finger tap :P

Cheers

Fabrice

[Martin Thomas Schrott]

Hi anton,

adding shortcuts always is a good idea, but removing essential buttons is quite not.

Any user who is presenting via bbb in a classroom or conference room, standing there with no keyboard will no longer be able to use the functions with their remote trackball/mouse or pointers.

in case of usability this is really a showstopper.

Daniel and I have accessibility review at 9a.m. utc today to see where our missing fixes got lost.

cheers

M

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