Slide handling could be improved

[Robin Munn]

When a new presenter starts a new session and isn't using slides, the last slide from the old presenter's session is left on-screen. The slide viewing area should probably be blanked when a new session is started without slides, perhaps with a "This presentation is not using slides" message in the blank area so that users don't ask why the slides aren't showing up.

When someone joins in the middle of an ongoing presentation, they won't see any slides until the presenter types [SLIDE #] to show the next slide. Depending on how many slides the presenter has and how often he/she is going through them, this could be a wait time of several minutes. It would be better to keep track of the "current" slide and have any new Lernid connections automatically show the "current" slide (once the slide PDF has been downloaded, of course).

The slide-viewing area could be used to provide feedback on the status of slides: "Slides downloading, please wait..." or "This presentation is not using slides" would both be more informative than a totally blank screen area.

[Nigel Babu (nigelbabu)]

This would be great indeed. Description updated.

[Nathan Handler (nhandler)]

I'm not quite sure how lernid would be aware of the 'current slide'. Lernid is only a client. When it is not connected, it has not idea what is going on. If it connects late, it has no way of knowing how many slides have already been shown. Adding some slide controls like in LP: #530817 might be the best way to solve this issue. It would allow the user to manually advance the slides until they appear to match up with what the instructor is saying. They could then simply ask someone in -chat what the current slide is meant to be.

[Mohammad AbuShady (coalwater)]

Can't lernid communicate with classbot ? like classbot should save current slide then tell lernid when it connects which slide to open to.. is this possible ?

[Elizabeth K. Joseph (lyz)]

The only thing ClassBot does with slides is shorten the URL for announcement in the topic and at the beginning of the session, it has no awareness of which slide is current because it doesn't track [SLIDE #] commands. Slide is purely a Lernid convention.

If ClassBot were to start tracking SLIDE commands this may be possible (ClassBot project page here: https://launchpad.net/classbot), but depending upon Lernid communicating with ClassBot has some complications (off the top of my head: netsplits or otherwise inability to talk to ClassBot, different language support for different names of ClassBot for different languages).

[Mohammad AbuShady (coalwater)]

We could add a new watcher like with "QUESTION" which saves questions, we could add "[slide #]" (which the instructor uses to indicate the slide) to save current slide, then lernid asks Classbot in a pm !slide for example and Classbot just writes 3 for slide 3 for example.
Is such thing possible or does it create some sort of problems with other things in the future?