New updates - backstage, sessions, schedule, general bug fixes, and more

We are continuing to prepare for our V2 beta coming up early March (maybe sooner), which will involve a redesign, rebrand, and replatforming of Hopin -- we can't wait to show you what we've been working on.

Meanwhile, we've added some new features to V1 (which still works well and supports events just fine) in the past three weeks. Here's a quick summary:

• Better sessions. Including improved audio and video device handling, the ability to reject requests in moderated sessions, and overall, everything runs faster.

• Schedule update. Session speakers now appear on the reception area schedule.

• Chat operates faster.

• Organisers can now remove and refund attendees. Go to View Attendees and click Remove next to their name. It will say Refund if it is a paid registration.

• Expo booths can now contain moderated sessions. This is great for having a vendor personnel "live" in their booth.

• Stabilised and revamped backstage: the look and feel of the backstage now matches a session. The backstage moderation system (accepting speakers onto the backstage) is much clearer and easier to use. There is now better reliability for dropped connections (stream won't stop until you manually stop the stream), and Hopin does a better job of detecting the state of the live stream.

One important change:

• Organisers can no longer update the start time of an event once it's already started. Instead, organisers can duplicate that event from the Organiser Home (click "Copy).

General fixes include:

• Smoothed out edge cases with payments integration

• More reliable email deliverability (still making improvements on this area)

• Improvements on recordings for sessions, still with some caveats (if you exit a recorded session recordings will stop and not resume).

Those are the highlights with plenty of other smaller improvements and myriad bug fixes. We are grateful for everyone's feedback and support during our "awkward" stage in between early access V1 and revamped V2. It's only going to get better from here. Stay tuned for more updates soon!