Etherpad experience

[annajiat]

Community members experience one or another etherpad issues and have confusions. I tried to list some of them below.

#. Feedbackups are numbered below.
-- dashes mean potential action plan or thoughts

1. keeps disconnecting
   -- it is helpful that we have the existing "connecting..." message, but still ...
2. additional pad window openings disconnect the previous ones
   -- i'm not sure if we should support this but it would be nice to have
3. temporary outage: bad gateway
   -- need more helpful error message like, try reloading after few minutes
4. longer outage
   -- we may plan for a carpentries wide service/infrastructure status (up/down) may be initiated
5. line numbers are not visible when not maximized
   -- it is not intuitive even though logical from responsiveness point of view
6. learners write in chat instead of the main body assuming main document is read-only
7. new community members are confused about how to change name and color
   -- may be a default text which gets auto-deleted on click
   -- sometimes it shows "enter your name" but sometimes its blank
8. Pad Settings
   -- it does not lookup / know existing settings
   ----turning off chat / userlist requires first turning it ON which has no effect as they are ON by default followed by turning those OFF
9. no easy way to close participant list and chat without detaching them first
   -- may be convert the top right icon to a toggle button
10. not intuitive to add new lines
11. difficult to work together, when trying write at the same location
12. sometimes it might be showing wrong name for the participant. Heard saying in zoom, "it says I am this person.. but I am not".
    -- I have not experienced this myself and was not able to reproduce this error

[fmichonneau]

Thanks for this feedback @annajiat!

We have explored other solutions but Etherpad still has most of the features we want for our community.

I have plans to improve several components of the Etherpad infrastructure that would make it more reliable but it would not address all of these concerns.

For some of those, it looks like having some documentation on how to use Etherpads would be useful.

[acrall]

Yes, thank you @annajiat! I'm happy to draft up some documentation to support use of the Etherpad, @fmichonneau, building on your recommendations @annajiat. Will share with you for edits/comments once it has been drafted. I'll set it up similarly to the Slack Quick Start Guide