Real-time collaboration on a board
A VNCboard board is a live document, not a file you send around. You can bring other people in two ways — Go live for real-time co-editing and Share for a read-only link — and both are covered in How boards, go-live and sharing work. This page explains what “real-time” means on top of that.
Living boards
Section titled “Living boards”- Everything you draw is saved as you work; the top bar shows Saved.
- If someone else changes the board while you are on it, you see their changes — you are not looking at a frozen copy.
The live session
Section titled “The live session”Go live starts a real-time session and copies an invite link:
- Select Go live — the invite link goes to your clipboard.
- Anyone who opens the link joins the same board and edits alongside you.
- You see each other’s cursors; as people join, the button reads ● Live · N with the number in the session.
- Select it again to leave the session.
The session is end-to-end encrypted: the shared key travels only in the link itself, and the collaboration service relays encrypted changes — it never sees or stores what is on your board. The link is the only thing you need to share, and the session ends when the last person leaves.
Go live is for co-editing. To hand a board to people who should only look, use Share — a read-only, expiring link.
For operators
Section titled “For operators”The real-time service exposes a health and metrics endpoint that reports counts and sizes only — active connections, rooms, participants, and the byte volume relayed. It never exposes board content, so the end-to-end encryption holds for monitoring too.
- The metrics endpoint is not reachable from the public site; only internal monitoring reaches it.
- Alerts watch for a restarted service, a drop in connections, or a service that stops reporting.
See the internal collab-ops notes in the repository for the scrape and alert definitions (an operations task, not an end-user one).
Screenshot: TODO —
assets/board-collaboration.png(see assets/TODO.md).