Network Connectivity

Due to the live nature of chat events, the Meet & Engage platform requires solid internet connectivity between your browser and the M&E servers and the live nature of chat events rely on a slightly different technology to that used to simply display web pages.

We will attempt to use various connection methods to reach the M&E servers, and occasionally might tell you that the connection is ‘degraded’. This means that you’re connecting via the slowest and least efficient method, and certain features may not work as you expect; typically this means that there may be a small delay between writing a message and seeing it appear as a new chat bubble, and other ‘laggy’ behaviour.

The reason this tends to happen is be because of tighter security on your organisation’s network than you would typically find on your home wifi or at the local Starbucks.

Note: We do the same checks to connect participants to your chat events, but we don’t inform them if their connection is degraded.

Whenever your computer loses network connectivity entirely during a chat (if you drop off your current wifi connection for example) the M&E page will test for a valid connection and then reconnect as soon as possible. Complete loss of connectivity doesn’t count as being ‘degraded’, so an otherwise good connection to the internet will allow for fast connectivity again when it reconnects.

The Science Bit

We only switch to ‘degraded’ mode, relying on longpoll connectivity, when the following is true:

You are using a browser that doesn’t support websockets, or websockets are blocked by your network firewalling
Websockets appear to connect, but are frequently disconnected
Your network firewalls block streaming data, or a proxy is waiting for entire messages to arrive before passing them to your browser.