EverWebinar Chat CSV formatting

Adding chat into EverWebinar can be easy for a few lines of chat, but tiresome for anything more. So we have provided the option of uploading a csv file with all your chat lines in it (shown below). If you have a previous WebinarJam chat that you liked, that chat can be downloaded from the WebinarJam analytics and uploaded here. Otherwise, you will need to create a new csv file.

When clicking to upload a file, you’ll be shown the requirements for your CSV. Your CSV file must only have 7 columns, containing the values below separated by commas. Each row in the CSV file will represent a new chat line.

• Hour: from 00 to 07
• Minute: from 00 to 59
• Second: from 00 to 59
• Name: name of the person
• Role: either Admin or Attendee
• Message: the actual chat comment
• Mode: either Chat, Question or Answer if role is “Attendee”, or Chat, Question, Answer, Highlighted or Tip if role is “Admin”.

Here is an example of how this will look:

The above file has all 7 columns and in the second row is the first message in the chat. The first three need to have double digits so hour is listed with 00 to represent 0 hours. Continuing to read, you’ll find that Janet, an attendee, entered the message Great to be here! as a chat message.

If any of the messages you are adding have commas included, you may want to add the messages in quotes like this:

Here’s a sample CSV file for you to model.

Once you have filled out your chat roll to your liking, you will need to export/save it as a CSV file with UTF-8 encoding. Now it is ready for upload to EverWebinar!

 

Maximum chat limits

In order to ensure your EverWebinar runs smoothly, the maximum number of chat lines to be pre-loaded are 5,000, or 1 Megabyte if you’re uploading a CSV file. Otherwise, the webinar would struggle to load up so many chat lines and the webinar experience would feel rather choppy.

So, if you see that you’re exceeding that limit, you’ll need to cut short the number of lines.

If you’re importing a live WebinarJam that already exceeds those limits, the system will import the full webinar except the chat itself, and the system will prompt an error message letting you know.

What you want to do at this point is this:

• Leave the configuration wizard of this EverWebinar, go back to WebinarJam, and download the chat history for the particular live webinar you were importing.
• Then, open the downloaded CSV file and manually delete chat lines until you’re under 5,000 lines. Then save the file and confirm that it’s under 1.0 MB (otherwise, delete some more lines).
• Finally, go back to EverWebinar, resume the configuration and, at the “Live” step of the wizard, upload the new, lighter version of the CSV file.

Finally, if you’ve activated the “Save real comments” options (see screenshot below), please note that the system will continue adding up real chat lines to your EverWebinar session until that particular session reaches the limit of 5,000 lines of chat. At that point, any further line will be ignored.