Welcome to Bevy's release notes! This month we’ve got a few product updates for you, along with some general improvements.

Summary

New Features

Chat emoji reactions

Skin tone support: Attendees can now choose their skin color to better express themselves. Once set, Bevy uses the chosen skin color for all future events for that attendee.

Contextual placement: You can now react to a conversation inline, which saves real estate and increases engagement.

Many-to-Many events

Any Bevy Community can now create a virtual event that automatically enables audio and video on entry for up to 50 people.

To enable many-to-many for an event, organizers select the new checkbox in the Virtual Event Platform section of event creation. This feature is geared toward events that average about 20-50 RSVPs. You can still use Bevy Virtual as is (few-to-many) by leaving the checkbox unselected.

Once an event is published, you can still select or clear this checkbox to turn the feature on or off.

When you select this box, it explicitly limits the room to up to 50 registrations and people. Attendees will get a warning if they set tickets above 50 in a many-to-many event.

We recently published guidance on Max Limits to clarify technical constraints for the number of people in a Bevy Virtual event and other BVC places like Stages and Booths.

SSL certificate management

We’ve automated the management of customer SSL certifications through Google Certs. This means that, instead of requiring you to update the certificate on your site and sharing your certificate and private key every 90 or 365 days, our system automatically makes the updates.

This is true even if we've purchased the SSL certificate for you. With this change, we've eliminated any downtime of your site caused by out-of-date certificates.

We’ll use the Google Trust Services CA. For more information, see https://pki.goog/. Note that it is not possible to use any CA other than Google CA.

Interprefy integration

Any conference event can contract Interprefy to provide real-time translation support in select languages for attendees on Stages or Sessions, both live and pre-recorded.

Attendees click the globe icon on Stages or Sessions and are able to select from a dropdown list of languages. This will mute the Bevy audio source and provide real-time translations.

Hide attendee count

Interested in masking the number of attendees currently at your Conference event? Send us a request to hide this in your upcoming conference.

Closed captioning in pre-recorded sessions

We now support closed captioning during your conference's live and pre-recorded sessions. Reach out to learn more.

Hide conference agenda

We have added a feature that lets you hide the conference agenda until you are ready to add it to the events page. This way, attendees can register while you finalize the content of the agenda, including schedule, speakers, and text.

To share the agenda on your events page, select the Hide Agenda checkbox in the Schedule section of the Admin Dashboard.

Fixes

Every month, we push a series of performance enhancements, improvements, and defect fixes across our products. Here are the highlights.

Full-length event titles are displayed correctly and do not get cut off.
Conference agendas can be large and are no longer included in Conference emails.
When the number of participants in presenter mode changes, individuals' videos no longer get cropped. In addition, we’ve adjusted positioning to prevent cropping the top or bottom of a presenter’s video, regardless of the number of presenters.
When you join a stage early, you no longer need to refresh to display the video content.
When all upcoming events are displayed, there are no longer forward and back arrows on either side of the event cards.
We implemented resizable columns to tables in forms to improve readability.
The agenda builder now displays the date range of an event, rather than simply “day 1, day 2…”
In the attendee list, clicking the audio or video button no longer opens a menu.
Chat fixes:
- In the chat window, multiple lines of text no longer affect the appearance of the chat tabs.
- You can delete chat messages, as expected.
- When using @mention with an attendee name that contains special characters, the text is now bold.
- The @mention feature is fully functional again and displays a list of names when you type the “at” sign.
- Typing “1:1” in the chat during an event no longer results in exiting from the video portion of the event.
- Emoji reactions sometimes were misaligned, depending on your screen size, and are now displayed correctly.
We have added the user's Session ID in the event for reference when completing pre-call check. This will make it easy for Bevy Support to track down user issues with audio, video, etc.