Disable Calling Functionality

[DrEVILish]

Request for Feature

Disable Calling Functionality while leaving the group chat functionality enabled and working.

Ability to disable Video and Screen Sharing while leaving Audio Chat working.

Edit:

@danir-de found a work around:

You can disable calling and videochatting as well as greying out the button but changing the following database entry:

appconfig > spreed > start_calls > 3

The buttons etc won't disappear, but all functionality will be disabled.

[WNYmathGuy]

I don't know if I'll sound ignorant here, but I tried a voice-only call from app to app and never got it to work right. The icon of the old wired phone handset would start a call but the other person's app had no way to answer it as a voice only call.

Seems like on a big group video chat business meeting it may be handy to let people who might participate in a questions portion of a Q&A might find voice only useful.

[JimBTek]

I'd love to enable just group Chat, and not enable any of the calling, and then progressively add audio, screen and maybe even video.

This is both for ease of rollout to 140 users and also because our bandwidth at our offices may not allow the others to work well.

[joe-speedboat]

@JimBTek
I just was looking for same functionality.
Talk is great for teamworking and discussing an issue but bandwith and connectivity needs are not really easy in the wild.
Would love to see possibility, even if it is disabling audio/video for whole server.
cheers chris

[WNYmathGuy]

Tested the Talk app (NextCloud server 16.0.1) voice only call from two mobile devices, Google Fi to Verizon. Things went well.

[yodatak]

I'm just looking for the same functionality !

[bes1002t]

would be a nice feature to reduce the needed bandwith if needed.

[wiswedel]

related: #3342

[tilobes]

Hi,
can you explain, why this feature takes so long?
Isn't it that simple, that you just have to modify the function
public function canStartCall(): bool
at spreed/lib/Participant.php plus the surrundings like setting options at admin interface?

[nickvergessen]

Feel free to send a pull request:
https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed#development-setup

We didn't do it, because it's not on the top of the priority list

[tilobes]

Thx for the quick answer, didn't expected that ;)
I have never used github, so my overhead doing that is too large.
How to get this topic up at priority? Is there a voting available?

[nickvergessen]

you can leave a 👍🏼 on the first post. That will help sort them in:
https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc

But even then it needs to be picked up. The Nextcloud employees currently work on Call features and improvements, so we won't pick up removing this as first "fun" task 😉

[WNYmathGuy]

you can leave a 👍🏼 on the first post. That will help sort them in:
https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc

But even then it needs to be picked up. The Nextcloud employees currently work on Call features and improvements, so we won't pick up removing this as first "fun" task

@nickvergessen I'm ignorant of all the open-source legalities, but could @tilobes or a collection of Nextcloud Talk dependents pool resources and place a bounty on such a feature to put it on the priority list for some coder inside Nextcloud or even in the ecosystem of related coders doing work on apps related to Spreed or Nextcloud?

[andreas-lindgren]

Hi

Is there any updates on this? I need a way to turn off video and audio calls for talk. The setting "Moderators only" don't help. I want to use Nextcloud talk, because of the integration with Nextcloud.

This has been asked before, but it seems like it takes a very long time to get this implemented. I have seen many users in the Nextcloud forum asking about this but still after several years there are no solution for this.

Can you explain why it takes so long time to get this fixed? I am not a developer, but in my opinion this should not be hard to get this fixed.

[nickvergessen]

Can you explain why it takes so long time to get this fixed? I am not a developer, but in my opinion this should not be hard to get this fixed.

There was a global pandemic pushing more people into calling then ever before. Apart from that we have customers paying us to develop certain other features, so a config to disable something is not the first thing we do if currently we heavily work towards the other end.

[danir-de]

You can disable calling and videochatting as well as greying out the button but changing the following database entry:

appconfig > spreed > start_calls > 3

The buttons etc won't disappear, but all functionality will be disabled.

[andreas-lindgren]

Hi @danir-de

Thank you for the info. This seems to be the best solution at the moment.

One question is if this entry will be changed after a Nextcloud or talk update?

[danir-de]

Hi @danir-de

Thank you for the info. This seems to be the best solution at the moment.

One question is if this entry will be changed after a Nextcloud or talk update?

I'm not sure since we enforce it with puppet, but I'd guess that it remains the same when there aren't any related code/db changes to that specific setting.

Maybe including this setting on the admin gui would resolve this issue?

[BlueRazer112]

Hello all,
can someone copy these lines from the appconfig for me?
Unfortunately I can't get the command line to work.

[gonzalo]

As our orgnization already provides a videocall solutionm, having this feature having this option on admin gui interface would be really interesting, and seems not hard to implement (not a developer, maybe I'm wrong)

Meanwhile, the DB trick seems to work fine. Call buttons are not seen anywere

[nickvergessen]

#7043

When you use a supported Nextcloud and Talk version the admin option is there. (was added before the now oldest supported version)