Gather for Communities - Feedback Q1

[Jommi]

Let us know your feedback! We are especially interested in feedback about think related specifically to run a community on Gather.

If you are facing technical difficulties, please use the official help channels instead:

• Gather’s Help Center: Gather Help Center Home
• Need help urgently? Send Gather an email: support@gather.town

Also, if you are requesting a feature, please use the Feature Request Board first, and link your post here in your reply.

[methods]

Thanks for creating a fun product! In the onboarding when creating the new spaces - the previews of the spaces don’t show enough detail on the number of rooms and layout which makes it difficult to decide what space would work best.

Also, the rule that once we set a name for the space, it cannot be changed adds more stress on setting up a space. I hesitate to select a prebuilt space template without being able to see the full map detail and would love to see the entire screenshot of the space before selecting.

Would be great to be able to change the entire space template if we selected one that we ended up not liking.

[Jommi]

Ahh damn, such a small technical thing of not being able to change the space name - yet it can have outsized effects on decision-making.

I will raise this internally! In the meanwhile could you add your comment here as well: Change room names | Voters | Gather.Town

[Kimmchoa]

this is how I felt too.

But yea! thank you for sharing gather to communities!

Issue no. 1 :
I can’t make the space be seen from the middle.
Because of that, community members would get lost,
or can’t see the road well.

what happened:
As I was building the space beside or beyond the chosen template,
I realised I don’t want or don’t need the initial room template anymore
so I deleted it.
But the problem is it became lop sided.
( please see image below )

Issue no. 2:
When other users in my space go to the town, there would be
plenty of question marks, as opposed to the actual images/furnitures uploaded : (
That’s why I’m choosing to just create a new space, instead of fixing
the work done.

please see image below

Would be nice if there were warning signs if its going to reach the point
where the images won’t load anymore

Issue no. 3
Running third party tools. we use an app that can get people into back to back one on 1 calls but we couldn’t access it through gather. So instead of running the event in gather from the very beginning, we had to go zoom first, and then go to the vidcall app before we reach gather town and by then, our members would have spent so much energy through the vidcall app and less likely to engage with gathertown.

please see image below

our event runs like at 9.30pm, at 10pm run the back to back calls…11pm we let the new people hang there…

would be nice to if there could be like cashier points where people can purchase the tickets on start of event time… like a point of entry with payable amounts, so people won’t also see the base point price and explain why it has to be charged at a certain price point ( coming from envisioning a for-profit org thats going to be running events )

It’s actually what happened to me when I effortfully brought people together, they didnt come back to build a space together with me anymore, but decided to start small groups built their own space and with less people = less chances of retention.

I’m not sure if it helps but im really thankful for the offers I have received to continue exploring with the space!

First time I experienced gather town, I wanted to bring my whole village here and sent proposals trying to reach the holiday season and get people to come here, unfortunately I couldn’t build the together universe I envisioned because onboarding people is still hard and its very difficult to comunicate its value… or even plan for like expenses because there’s no guarantee. It would be nice to let go of the idea of managing its cost or leaving the the burden to the people who enter the event space.

Issue 4

Creating a trade show from scratch is very difficult as a 1 man team and i think perhaps it would help to design it in a way that a 1 man team can do it all.
The image above shows physical restaurants or instagra shops I have built into the space. However its really too taxing to do everything, having to deal with so many parties. But the hardest thing is balancing the price and people’s free action and reaction.

BUT STILL i would like to say gather town is amazing!
Though its really an effort or take alot of loading time…
BUT WILL CONTINUE to push through BECAUSE i think its an amazing future and
also because of the offer!!

VISION: I was hoping the experience for gather town is something like
an existing “common” lobby or lounge area that people can just easily
go into and chill like a living room in their own homes. CO-LIVING with one another.

Hope this helps!

As a new user, I cannot upload more than 1 image.

[Floxies_Community]

I also struggled with the name-changing not being an option - in fact, I had to copy the whole space and start a new one with the new name.

Is there a possibility we could have memberships within the community spaces?
Say, for example, I’d like people from my community to be members but I’d like to keep the space open to visitors and people coming from “outside” to take part to our weekly events.

Could you please implement the option to select from than one object at the time in the editor? it’s hard sometimes when you have to move around ten chairs and you have to do all of that individually

[sidcode]

Hi all, I introduced our community in this post. Personal feedback from the event we had last Friday:

• There was a visible lag when 250+ members joined in at the same time as the link was shared in our zoom call with 350+ members. Some members reported their screen freezing, browser going out of memory, and some even had their laptops crash altogether
• Most people (~200) who survived the initial hiccups stayed for a long while.
• The space stabilized after about 5-7 minutes.
• Those who quit after facing the first few minutes of hiccups either gave bad feedback or stayed in zoom.
• We had 150 people talking even after an hour was over.
• People were using every inch of the space and appreciated go-karts.
• Fellows were asking me if gather would become a regular weekly thing for hackathons, guilds, sessions, etc. They want it to stay.
• Veteran Gather users were amazed at how far we pushed the abilities of Gather in this space.
• In general, everyone whom I met told me on their own that they loved the space.
• Most of them had ideas on collaboratively building the space further for which I plan to create another channel for interested builders.

[Jommi]

Thank you for the feedback!

[taufiq]

Hello, everyone.

My space was created from the Deluxe Conference layout with multiple rooms.

I was adding some items to my main space and I somehow clicked on the floors and tiles section without realising it. Without any warning the entire floor was deleted on my main space. Now I have some users stuck in one room and all new users are getting stuck in a dark room.

I am facing a lot of issues because of this and this happened while I was in the middle of an online gathering.

Does anybody have any suggestions for this?

Is there a way I can revert back to my default template at least?

Please do help. Thanks!

[Bill_Uncork-It]

Unfortunately, there really isnt a way to revert. However, if you are using a template space, you could:

• Create a new version of the space,
• go into Mapmaker,
• download the backgrounds from the rooms missing backgrounds, and
• upload those images into the original space as the background

[Shouwasan]

Hello everyone!

Some quick feedback from me after a number of hosted events:

1. The Password Doors feature seems to have a limit. Multiple password doors tend to “break”. I had set up the room for a team escape room, using password doors with hints each team had to solve in order to reach the goal. However, after setting up 30 doors (and I had to go and check each one of them!) after reloading the room almost half of them were open or had lost the password setup. Tried repeating two times, and every time a different set of doors would break.

2. The fire cracker feature: it would be nice if room hosts could disable this feature. Some “playful” users tend to spam this, which creates horrible lag to other users in the room. Having a way to disable this kind of animations depending on the event would be really helpful.

3. A mute all option. I do love the fact that you can adjust the volume of every single user, but as a room host, it would be nice to be able to just mute everyone depending on the situation.

4. I have experienced the same issue others have pointed above. The room seems to need a few minutes to “stabilize” after users start logging in. Turning on the new feature that allows to preload the entire room before joining doesn’t seem to have any influence on this.

5. Will be redundant, but many have requested the camera blur / virtual background feature. It stops too many people from turning their cameras on.

That’s all for now!

[ProfessorWingman]

I, too, had issues with the name changing but outside of that, our experience has been fantastic. My community is primarily made of college students and they’ve used our community space for everything, from movie night watch parties to class presentations. We are in the process of building out a pitch competition and a hackathon event within our space.

The only major obstacle is that alot of our students access the platform via their phones and as we all currently know gather town is not its best in cell phone view, but… it doesn’t deter the students, so that’s a win for me.

[BuilderofQuests]

I definitely resonate with some of the feedback about gather taking some time to load at the start of the session and being rather glitchy at time. I have also struggles similarly with naming g of spaces and rooms as there is no room for error.

We’ve been using gather for 3 months to run cohort based classes and our learners love the experience after 2-3 sessions on gather. h
Here are some major drawbacks keeping us from committing to gather as ONLY tool of choice

1. Inability to mute your class/other members or guests. This can be disruptive as everyone else who is mutes has to wait for this person to realise they are being called upon for being unmuted and unmute themselves
2. Spawn location. We travel from room and room and not being able to have everyone respawn in the same location means we have to spend some time each class hunting for missing members who are online but not in the same room as this weeks class
3. Lack of guidance for file sizes, it would be helpful if gather could highlight when a map is starting to get to heavy with objects and graphics so that we can minimise the file sizes and avoid a situation where students only see question marks
4. Lastly, Usage Analytics

[Floxies_Community]

Gather is simply the best thing that has happened to me in a long time!

I simply love the Flow that it allowed me to create between managing my Community on Discord and hosting weekly events in our Gather Space.
It encourages me to push my limits and I’ve recently built an educational room within my space where our members will be receiving hands-on practice sessions on design or webflow development.

I appreciate the work you do and how you seek improvement by asking us, your users, directly for feedback.

I’d be happy to help in any other way and help this amazing product succeed even more.

I will add a feature request, some of my members have mentioned having some sort of transcript available to make our events with guest speakers even more accessible.

I haven’t found the karts though, are they in the object panel?

Looking forward to taking part in the treasure hunt too and here’s a sneak peek of one of the latest global events organised by Finsweet and other Webflow Communities

[douglasqian]

The map view is super cool! How did you do that? Also haven’t found the karts yet but that sounds super fun

[douglasqian]

What we are doing:

• Hosting a community of ~30 people on Gather (no more Zoom)
• Biggest event so far was kickoff (see below) with smaller weekly meetups
• Used broadcast tile with screenshot for presentation during kickoff
• Designed a custom space for all community events, HEAVY use of mapmaker

What we learned:

• Feedback was 60/40 from kickoff
• 60% of people found the platform cool and wanted to explore more
• 40% ran into technical issues, found the metaverse aspect too distracting/overwhelming → need more onboarding time

Other feedback:

• Hard to know if an existing space fits our needs when we’re scrolling through them → need space preview before selecting and realizing it’s not right (+1 to this mentioned above).
• We consistently run into technical issues around screen sharing (even on browsers that have done it before). The error message today isn’t very helpful when it comes to browser settings vs system settings. Would be great to attach a more in-depth troubleshooting page for this issue as it seems to come up a lot.
• Object search could be more consistent. Specifically, searching by tags or themes for example seem to work with certain objects but not all (instead of a substring match on object name). This would be super useful for designing spaces of a certain vibe. I’ve sometimes resorted to creating a new space from a template to inspect the name of all the objects there that fit a certain theme, and this was super tedious.
• Not being able to change the name of a space or room (low-key painful).
• Was also annoying loading templates to see how nice they are just to realize that they were hard-coded and uploaded by team rather than things available in the object picker. Would be nice to make it easier to know this upfront (maybe in the aforementioned preview feature).
• Love the calendar integration and Gather calendar locations with custom spawn tile IDs!!!

[abyss_angel]

Hi, first of all, thanks for the opportunity. It was a lot of fun to experiment with the Gather space!

Here’s a few things we’ve implemented in our space:

• One of our room was an arcade room. We put a ton of classic arcade games, as well as browser-based multiplayer games, such as Krunker.io, or Powerlines.io
• We also had a cabin with a ton of browser-based board games.
• We even made a “museum of nostalgic sounds” in a grotto by uploading custom objects with sound through the web API.

At our peak, we had about 20-30 people connected at the same time. We didn’t encounter any major problem.

Here’s our feedback:
As a space editor, It would be nice to have the possibility to upload custom floor tiles, and custom walls.
Floor tiles would be straightforward.
For custom walls, users could upload one image per angle that the wall can be seen from. The wall building tool could then place it accordingly.

One thing we have found a tad annoying, is that small rooms don’t center automatically on screen.
One way to work around this is to add a piece of wall at each extremity of the map, and then placing the room in the center of it.

As a player/user, when navigating a room with many people in proximity, it would be great if the top bar prioritized showing people who have a webcam on, rather than whatever order it is currently being displayed.

What we loved the most:

• Background/Foreground upload feature makes for a fully customizable experience
• Uploading custom objects using the web API to change properties such as sound

What we would like to see improved:

• Automatically keep smaller rooms centered on screen
• Prioritize showing users with a webcam on in the top bar

The map of our space:

[choomk311]

Hi!

Am an educator in Singapore and have been using Gathertown for an extended period of time for my History lessons.

I love the whiteboarding feature embedded in one of your templates as I am able to make formative assessments of my students learning. It engages my students a lot and it encourages an inductive approach towards learning. However, I’ve stumbled across the issue of being limited by the objects found in the object picker.

As such I would often have to draw it in painfully using an external pixel software. It would be awesome if there was some inbuilt image pixel software that we could leverage on to create our own pixelated objects within the platform itself. I had to draw in a Non-Playable Character (NPC) lookalike for one of my virtual museums whereby they could elicit a text when my students’ avatar goes near it. Drawing the ‘NPCs’ out was time-consuming and I often wished there was a stock image of an NPC (male and female) that educators like us can leverage on.

Apart from this issue, the platform provides a great opportunity for my students to take ownership of their own learning. I hope to be able to continue providing such opportunities for my students in the future because I believe Gather is an extremely power tool for educators like me to reimagine how teaching should look like. Thank you for all the work you’ve put in this platform! Am excited to see new future features in the platform!

[wesoli]

So far we’ve run a few small introduction to Gather.town events (~20 people) within our community. The age ranges from people in their 20’s to probably 60’s.

Some comments from my experience thus far:

• Those who grew up with the top down, arrow keys based games take to it very quickly.
• Being able to click with your mouse to a new position is useful - people are used to point-and-click.
• No performance issue noted.
• Consider auto-sizing the videos to a bigger format when an avatar is stationery and talking to 1 or more people. I often find I need to point out the arrows to increase the video size. When the avatar starts to move reduce the video size so they can view where there are moving to.
• When broadcasting to an audience and someone raises their hand it would be nice to be able to engage with that person by clicking on them. As the broadcaster (or if an admin is present) you can choose to lower their hand/mute them.
• When broadcasting it would be useful to be able to record what is being said. Anyone who missed the talk can watch the replay later.

We are planning a bigger event towards the end of April/beginning June.

Gather.town is such a great concept and I love seeing how easily people take to it once they’ve got the basic concepts under the belt.

Keep up the great work

[Jommi]

AFAIK camera nowadays centers on the middle of your screen btw! Does it now work as you hope?

[ultraroxy]

Our Gather space has been a great place for my research community which spans academia and non-profit organizations. We use our virtual “lab” as a place for students and junior researchers to attend “office” hours, conduct group work, engage in lectures, and have multiple simultaneous 1-1 meetings.

We typically have been 5 and 50 people hanging out in the space, depending on the day and time. We’ve noticed a few performance issues with folks on older hardware where the interface appears distorted, monochrome (usually green), and highly pixelated or full of lines. Closing the browser and reopening seems to fix the issue, but I’ve been unable to reproduce it on my newer machines.

The biggest issue we tend to face is difficulty with screen share. I give folks instructions for how to enable screen share in their browsers, but inevitably once a week someone has issues and we spend 5 minutes having to address their settings or reboot their machines. Again, this isn’t a problem I have faced myself, but many visitors to the space seem to have this issue.

We have also noticed difficulty for users joining through mobile. Frequently their connections drop and audio/video are not available. Also they report difficulties in using the chat functions, which seems to conflict or block the ability to hear/see other participants.

Despite these performance issues, Gather has been an excellent place for our research community to meet with one in other, often in hybrid scenarios. Several of our neurodivergent community members have reported that they prefer the interface over Zoom. And despite some of the challenges of adopting it, our community is enjoying feeling that we are in an actual place where people come and go, rather than an abstract virtual void.