Troubleshooting
Interviews go wrong in a handful of predictable ways: a microphone that nobody granted permission to, a laptop that dropped off the wifi, a participant sitting in a waiting room that nobody is watching. This page covers each one: what causes it, and what actually fixes it.
Each section is headed with the problem in the words you would use to describe it. Jump to the one that matches what you are seeing.
If you are a participant who was invited to an interview rather than the person running it, start with Joining an interview. It explains the normal path before anything goes wrong.
My camera or microphone isn’t working
Almost always, this is browser permission. Your browser asks each website separately for camera and microphone access, and it remembers your answer. If you clicked Block once, or dismissed the prompt without choosing, the browser keeps refusing quietly from then on, on every future interview.
Be aware that a refusal does not always produce a visible error. Sometimes the device preview shows the message “Camera/microphone access was denied. Please allow access in your browser settings.” But the app is also built to carry on without your devices rather than stop you, so it is common to join a call that looks completely normal and only discover the problem when someone says they cannot hear you. If people cannot hear or see you and there is no error on screen, treat it as a permission problem anyway.
To grant access again:
- Look at the left-hand end of your browser’s address bar, where the web address starts. Depending on the browser you will see a padlock, a small camera icon, or a sliders icon. Click it.
- In the panel that opens, find the camera and microphone entries for this site and set both to allow.
- Reload the page. Permission changes do not take effect in a call that is already running.
- Close any other app that is holding the camera: a video call in another tab, or a desktop meeting app running in the background. Most cameras can only be used by one program at a time.
- Rejoin, and check the preview before you go in. If you have more than one camera, microphone, or set of speakers, the preview screen has a picker for each. A headset that was plugged in after the browser started sometimes needs choosing by hand.
If the browser panel shows access as already allowed and it still does not work, the block is one level up: your computer’s own privacy settings can withhold the camera or microphone from the whole browser. Check the camera and microphone permissions for your browser in your operating system’s privacy settings, then restart the browser.
Which browsers does LetsFindWhy support?
LetsFindWhy runs in a current version of any mainstream desktop or mobile browser, and it does not check which one you are using. There is no compatibility warning and no blocked-browser screen.
That is worth knowing because of how an incompatible browser actually presents. Instead of telling you it is too old, it fails at the point where the video call asks for your camera and microphone, so an outdated browser looks exactly like a permission problem, and you can lose a lot of time on permission settings that were never wrong.
So if you have worked through the camera and microphone steps above and nothing helped, updating your browser (or simply opening the same link in a different one) is a genuine next step rather than a last resort. If the interview works in the second browser, the first one was the problem.
I got disconnected from a meeting
Short network interruptions are handled for you. When the connection drops, a “Reconnecting…” marker appears in the meeting’s control bar and the app tries to restore the session by itself. Most wifi blips recover within a few seconds and nobody needs to do anything.
The retrying is limited, though. If connecting fails, the app tries again up to three times, waiting a little longer before each attempt. Only after the third failure does it stop and show you an error. So a meeting that sits on “Reconnecting…” for a while is still trying, but once you see an error message, it has given up and will not recover on its own.
At that point, reopen your original link. Interview invitation links are not single-use and they do not expire, so the same link from the same email works again and puts you back into the same interview. Refreshing the page is the fastest way to trigger this.
One thing to expect when you come back: if the interview uses a waiting room, you rejoin it the same way you arrived the first time, and a moderator has to let you back in. If you are the moderator, watch for returning participants rather than assuming they gave up.
The AI moderator didn’t join
When an AI moderator is invited (either by you, or automatically once the expected number of respondents has connected), it is given 60 seconds to arrive in the room. If it has not connected by then, the attempt is marked as failed and it will not turn up later.
Where you find out about that matters. The failure is reported in one place only: the discussion guide panel inside the meeting, where the AI moderator button sits. The reason for the failure appears there as red text and the button changes to Retry AI Moderator. Clicking it dispatches a fresh attempt, which usually works. Only Moderators and Observers see this button at all.
This has an honest consequence for unattended interviews. If nobody from your team is in the room (the normal setup when the AI is meant to run the session on its own), nothing is shown to anyone. The respondent sits in a call where the AI simply never arrives, with no message explaining why and nothing they can do about it.
If you are already in the room when it fails, reload the meeting page before you conclude anything. The panel checks the AI moderator’s status when it loads, so a failure that happened while you were sitting there may not appear until you refresh.
There is also a cause that looks identical but is not a failure at all. If every question in the discussion guide is already ticked off, there is nothing left for the AI to ask, so the button is greyed out and reads No questions left to read. Unticking the questions you still want asked makes the AI available again.
When a retry also fails, your options are to moderate the interview yourself using the discussion guide, or to end the session and rebook. Waiting does not help. The failed attempt is final.
My recording failed
A recording that could not be assembled opens with “Recording failed” where the video player would be, and the line “This recording couldn’t be processed. Use the menu above to delete it.”
Take that instruction literally, because deleting is the only action available. There is no retry, no reprocess, and no support request that recovers the file. The download option is switched off for a failed recording, and the video of that session does not exist in a form anyone can retrieve. It is not held somewhere pending a fix. Delete the entry to clear it from your Recordings list, and treat the session video as lost.
One thing usually does survive. The transcript panel beside the player is loaded separately from the video, so if live transcription was running during the interview, those segments are still there and still readable on the failed recording’s page. Before you delete anything, check that panel and copy out what you need. For many analysis purposes the transcript is most of the value.
A participant can’t join
Work through these in order: the first one accounts for most cases, and costs nothing to check.
They are in the waiting room and nobody has let them in. By default, joining an interview does not put someone straight into the call. They land on a screen reading “Waiting for the moderator to let you in” and stay there indefinitely. From inside the meeting, open the moderator panel and look for the Waiting Room section, which shows a count of people waiting, then click Admit beside a name, or Admit All. A participant who says they joined and then heard nothing is nearly always sitting here.
Their invitation was revoked. They see “This invitation is no longer valid.” Note what happens when you invite the same person again after revoking: they get a brand-new link, and the link in the older email stays permanently dead. If someone is bouncing off this message, make sure they are opening the most recent invitation email rather than the first one.
They were removed from the meeting earlier. They see “You have been removed from this meeting.” This is matched on their email address as well as their link, so sending a fresh invitation to the same address will not get them back in.
The meeting has ended. Participants see “This meeting has ended.” and are turned away. A moderator opening the same link reopens the session, so if you ended it early by mistake, join it yourself first and then have the participant retry their link.
What is not the cause: an expired or used-up link. Interview invitation links have no expiry date and no usage limit, so “the link must have timed out” is worth ruling out immediately rather than investigating. A link that stops working was revoked, or it belongs to a session that ended.
One limit that is easy to misread: the expected-respondents count caps how many invitations you can send, not how many people can join. If you are blocked at the Send invitation(s) step rather than at the door, revoke an invitation you no longer need or raise the expected respondents in that interview’s settings.
Tips for researchers
- Do a dry run from the exact machine, browser, and network you will moderate on, and join it as a participant too. Camera permission is remembered per browser per site, so granting it once during a dry run removes the single most common failure from the real session.
- Sit in on the first few AI-moderated interviews of a study as an Observer. A failed AI dispatch is only visible and only retryable from inside the room. Unattended, it is silent, and you lose the session rather than the sixty seconds.
- Check the discussion guide has unticked questions before an AI interview. A guide left fully ticked from a previous session disables the AI moderator entirely, and it reads as a technical fault rather than a checkbox.
- Assign someone to watch the waiting room for group sessions. Latecomers do not announce themselves, and a moderator deep in a discussion will not notice a participant queueing outside it.
- Start live transcription on high-stakes sessions even when you are recording. It is stored separately from the video, so it is what you still have if the recording fails to process.
- Send participants Joining an interview with the invitation rather than on the day. It gets them through the permission prompt before your billed time starts running.