Attendees reach the room through the private link in their confirmation and reminder emails. A link without a valid token is redirected to the registration page instead.
What happens in the room:
- Before the start time the room shows a live countdown
- At start time an Enter Webinar button appears, which satisfies the browser rule that sound needs a click before it plays
- Playback is positioned from the server clock, so everybody sees the same moment and a latecomer drops in where the session actually is
- There is no scrub bar, and playback is corrected if it drifts out of sync
- When the session has run its length, the room shows a thank you panel with a link to the replay
The side rail:
The rail shows the session state, an attendee counter and the chat. The counter is the number of distinct attendees whose heartbeat has been seen in the last two minutes.
How chat is delivered:
Attendees never poll PHP for the chat. Every write rebuilds a single small JSON file in your uploads folder, and the room reads that static file every three seconds. Posting a message is the only request that touches PHP, and only a fraction of attendees ever type. The chat design targets around 500 attendees on ordinary hosting. There is no hard attendee cap coded into the plugin, and true capacity depends on your host, so test at the scale you expect before a big promotion.
Chat limits:
A message can be up to 500 characters, and each attendee can post once every five seconds.
Simulated chat:
On the Chat tab you can add scripted lines that appear at set times into the webinar, written as minutes and seconds. They merge into the same feed as real messages and are sorted by time alongside them. Click Generate with AI to draft fourteen realistic lines spread across the webinar, based on your own slides, with greetings early, reactions in the middle and buying interest later. Edit anything you do not like.
If the chat folder is not writable:
Diagnostics checks this and the Chat tab warns you. Ask your host to make the WordPress uploads folder writable so the fast static delivery can be used.