NetSendo v2.11.2: Live Webinar Chat & Timezone Fixes

Imagine your auto-webinar is running and the room looks right: the video plays and the countdown works. But the chat panel says "Loading chat…" and never loads. Your scripted questions never show up, viewers can't ask anything, and the room shows "0 viewers". On top of that, a session booked for 19:00 starts at 20:00.

NetSendo v2.11.2 is a maintenance release that fixes these problems. It makes the webinar room chat work, corrects timezone handling across the webinar module and fixes date calculations that broke after the upgrade to Carbon 3.

🚀 What's New in v2.11.2

The Webinar Room Chat

The room at /webinar/{slug}/watch/{token} had a chat panel, but no code or endpoint behind it. Now the room checks for new messages every 4 seconds and sends messages to the same address. Posting is rate-limited per registration:

GET  /webinar/{slug}/chat/{token}   # fetch messages (every 4 s)
POST /webinar/{slug}/chat/{token}   # send a message (rate-limited)

For auto and hybrid webinars, the chat script plays back on each viewer's own session clock. Think of it as subtitles synced to each viewer's playback:

• A line set at 00:25 appears 25 seconds after that viewer's session started.
• Viewers who join late see what was "said" before they arrived.
• Lines that aren't due yet are never sent to the browser, so a viewer can't read ahead in the page source.
• "Show randomly" lines are chosen once per viewer, so they don't change between polls.

The Studio's chat modes now apply in the room:

• Host only: viewers can't send messages.
• Q&A only: messages are saved as questions.
• Moderated / require approval: other viewers don't see a message until you approve it. A message waiting for approval is no longer shown to other viewers first.
• Slow mode: viewers have to wait between messages.

Recordings show the Studio's viewer count (base ± variance) instead of "0 viewers". If you turn Chat enabled off, the panel is removed from the room, and rooms that are already open drop it at the next poll. The Studio no longer shows the raw webinars.chat.disabled key, and its chat texts are translated into all four languages.

Timezone Handling

Two timezone bugs affected webinar times. The panel sends the start time without a timezone, and it was read as UTC. A Warsaw webinar set for 19:00 therefore started at 20:00 in winter (21:00 in summer). Meanwhile, the sign-up page and emails printed the stored digits and still said 19:00.

The time you enter is now read in the webinar's timezone (or your account's timezone if the webinar doesn't have one) and stored in UTC. Auto-webinar slots now include their UTC offset:

{
  "slot": "2026-11-12T18:40:00+01:00"
}

A value that includes an offset, such as 2026-11-20T18:00:00Z, keeps it. The edit form now shows which timezone you're editing in, and creating a webinar with a start time that has already passed is refused. Every place that shows the time converts it to the right timezone: the sign-up page, the thank-you screen, the watch page, the emails, the page builder's date blocks and the {{webinar_date}} and {{webinar_time}} tokens.

⚠️ Hosts: re-check upcoming live and hybrid webinars. Webinars scheduled before this version keep their stored time, which is the time the countdown and reminders already used. A webinar entered as 19:00 in Warsaw now shows as 20:00 everywhere. If you meant 19:00, open the webinar, set 19:00 again and save.

Carbon 3 Date Calculations

Carbon 3 returns signed differences. $later->diffInDays($earlier) is now negative, while Carbon 2 always returned a positive number. That broke several features:

• subscribed_days_ago never matched, so automations that used it never ran. It now counts whole days since the subscriber joined the event's list.
• Brain's CRON gave the lowest urgency to the agents that had been idle the longest. An agent last run 14 days ago scored −16 instead of 25. Urgency now grows with the days since the agent's last successful run.
• Google Calendar reminders for CRM tasks arrived as "0 minutes before". Tasks that have a reminder but no due date now sync with the calendar's default reminders.
• Leaving the webinar room returned HTTP 500, because the watch time was negative and MySQL refused it for an unsigned column.
• Importing a live session's chat into an auto-webinar chat script failed because every message got a negative show time. Messages now keep their offset from the session's start.
• "Avg. duration" in Settings → CRON is no longer negative.

💼 Benefits & Use Cases

🛠️ Step-by-Step: Upgrade and Verify

1. Back Up Your Database

   Take a MySQL dump before you upgrade. This is always a good habit on self-hosted installs.

2. Pull the New Version

   Update your Docker deployment:

   docker compose pull
   docker compose up -d

   The automatic migration adds the new webinar_registrations.visit_started_at column.

3. Audit Upcoming Webinars

   Open each upcoming live or hybrid webinar. The edit form now shows its timezone. If the time is wrong, enter it again and save.

4. Configure the Chat

   In the Studio, check that Chat enabled is on, choose a chat mode and set slow mode if you need it.

5. Test as a Viewer

   Register with a test email, join the room and check that the scripted lines appear at the right moments and that messages you post follow your moderation settings.

6. Re-check Automations

   Rules that use subscribed_days_ago will start matching now. Review them so a backlog of matching subscribers doesn't get messages you don't want them to receive.

ℹ️ Note: Auto-webinar sessions booked before this release keep their stored times. Only new bookings use the corrected slot timezone.

Other fixes: public webinar pages now declare their actual language instead of always lang="pl", the thank-you screen shows the time as "12.11.2026 · 21:25" in every language, and the room's "your browser cannot play this video" text is translated.

✅ Conclusion

v2.11.2 makes NetSendo webinars more reliable. The chat works and auto-webinar scripts play back on each viewer's own timeline. Webinar times follow the timezone you set, and the "attended" list reflects actual watch time. Because NetSendo is self-hosted, your webinar data, chat logs and subscriber lists stay on your own server.