A session’s interactive tab is the best place to engage your audience with the ability to chat and ask questions in real time. This is done using the Q&A and the Comments tab of the session’s side bar.
For added moderation, Canapii’ s event Console provides admins with the ability to see these comments and questions come through in real time on the backend. Admins can see this feed by navigating to the session’s settings page and scrolling down to the ‘Interactive tab’ option. Here they can toggle between the Q&A feed and the Comments feed.
If you’d like your moderators to be able to answer your attendees’ questions in the Tech support tab, go to sessions within the Console and then click Settings. Add the moderators’ email addresses (one email per line) in the Session admins field. If this is left blank, the questions will come through to the Canapii support team instead.
Public, private or moderated?
Using the Q&A section of the session’s interactive bar, is a great place to host an engaging Q&A. Firstly, ask yourself whether the questions that your attendees raise should be set to be either public, private or moderated.
The private, public & moderated modes aren’t defined to the Q&A, they can each also be enabled for the ‘comments’ tab.
To switch a session’s questions tab between public, private or moderated – simply navigate to the individual session’s settings page, scroll down and select Interactive tab (and make sure your Questions or Comments tab is highlighted). Here you will see a Public, Private & Moderated toggle.
‘Public’ mode:
Public questions & comments allow all attendees and speakers to see the questions come through, in real time via the interactive tab. With this method, attendees are able to upvote the questions so that it’ll appear higher on the chat with the more ‘likes’ it receives. Speakers are required with this setting to keep an eye on the interactive tab in order to answer the questions as they see fit.
‘Private’ mode:
If you choose to have the questions tab set to private this will completely hide any questions & comments raised by attendees, from other attendees’ view. However, an admin has the ability to approve and send question on to the speaker via the Console.
The admin moderator, will moderate questions by navigating to the session’s settings page, scrolling down and selecting the interactive tab. Once here they can toggle to the question channel and be able to view the questions being submitted in real time.
Moderators are also able to edit questions, or add a note that can be sent to the speaker (an example of a note may be “last question!” or “3 minutes remaining!”). Once the moderator approves of a question, they can select show which will send the question to the dedicated Q&A page.
The dedicated questions page is a separate page that allows anyone with the unique link to have a simple view of real time information i.e. whom has asked questions, the moderator’s note (if applicable) and the number of likes a question has received from other attendees.
‘Moderated’ mode:
If the moderated mode has been enabled for either the Q&A or comments tabs within a session this enables the admin to moderate the comments/questions which come in.
The admin will sit within the session (console side) and watch the messages come in. If the admin approves of a comment, they can then select ‘show’. Upon selecting show, the comment would have been approved and will be pushed to ‘live’/public view.
Note: If images are submitted in Moderated mode, the admin will see a preview (console side) which will enable them to further moderate the comments/Q&A.
But what if you want both a public and private channel for your session?
Many users will have both the Comments tab (think public chat for all attendees to see by default) as well as a private Questions tab that is directed at the speakers of the session.
External Q&A page #
Share the external questions page by selecting get external questions page.
This will copy the page link to your clipboard. Paste this link into a browser tab or share it with the speakers. You will be taken to the external questions page where approved questions will appear for anyone who has the link.
You can set up the look of the external Q&A page and have the ability to toggle the response counter display.
Anonymous Comments and Q&A #
How to restrict your audience from posting anonymous comments
As event organizers you are also able to prevent attendees from posting anonymous comments. This is quite simply enabled/disabled from the console.
Simply go into the session > scroll down to interactive tab > comments > toggle ‘enabled or disabled’
Anonymous Q&A
Attendees, however, are able to post questions to the Q&A tab anonymously by clicking the 
icon.