Rooms and invites
A collaboration room is a named group of people attached to one map. While you are in a room, Mantis keeps a WebSocket open and shares presence, the bags you build, and the annotations you write with everyone else in that room. Room state is saved so a team can pick the map back up where they left it.
Where to find it
The Collaborate button sits in the space menu bar, to the right of the menus. It is disabled until the space finishes loading. Once you are in a room the button shows the room’s name instead, and the avatars of everyone currently connected appear beside it.
Clicking it opens the Collaboration dialog, which has four tabs: Rooms, Team, Invitations and Settings.
Rooms
New Room opens a small form: a Room Name (required) and an optional Description. Creating a room binds it to the map you have open and drops you straight into the Team tab.
Below the form, your rooms are listed in two groups: rooms you created, marked with a crown, and Shared With You. Each row shows the member count and, if anyone is connected, a pulsing count of who is online. Enter makes a room active; the row then reads Active. Owners get a delete button on their own rooms.
A room belongs to the map it was created on. The Rooms tab lists all of your rooms across every map, but entering a room that belongs to a different map will not connect you: open that map first.
Team
The Team tab is where the work happens. It is disabled until a room is active.
- Save State writes the current room state to the server, and the header above it shows when it was last saved and by whom.
- Exit Room leaves the room and closes the connection. It does not delete anything.
- Team Members lists everyone with a role dropdown next to them. Owners can change anyone else’s role and remove members; you cannot change your own.
- Pending Invitations lists invites that have not been answered, with a button to revoke each one. Owners only.
Inviting someone
Only a room owner sees the invite form.
- Enter the room you want to invite into, from the Rooms tab.
- Type their email address in the Invite by email field.
- Pick a role, either Owner or Editor.
- Click Invite. The invitation appears under Pending Invitations.
There are exactly two roles. Owner can invite, change roles, remove members and delete the room. Editor can do everything else. There is no view-only role, so anyone you invite can change shared state.
No email is sent. Mantis records the invitation against that address and shows it to the invitee inside the app, on their own Invitations tab. If they never open Mantis, they never learn about it, so tell them separately. Inviting an address that is already a member, or that already has a pending invite for that room, is silently skipped.
Invitations
Your own pending invitations live here, each showing the room name, who invited you, and the role you were offered. Accept joins the room; Decline dismisses it. Neither is instant across sessions, so use Refresh if you are expecting one that has not shown up.
What is shared live
While a room is active, these travel between members:
| What | How often |
|---|---|
| Cursor position | at most once per second |
| Viewport (center, size, zoom) | checked every 3 seconds, sent only if it moved |
| The point you have selected | on change |
| Your bags | on change |
| Text annotations, including replies | on change |
| A presence heartbeat | every 15 seconds |
When someone else changes their bags you get a toast naming them and the bags they touched.
Cursors, viewport rectangles and remote selection highlights are drawn only on Map (Legacy). The default map does not render them, so on it you will see the presence avatars, the bag toasts and shared bags, but not other people’s pointers. If watching each other move is the point of the session, open Map (Legacy).
Saved room state
Room state is saved automatically every five minutes while a room is active, and whenever anyone presses Save State. It is loaded automatically when you join a room that has state saved.
What gets saved today is your bags: their names, the point ids in them, their colors, which bags are selected, and the associated global variables and multi-clipboard entries. Panel layout, camera position and tool state are not part of room state.
When the connection drops
The client pings every 15 seconds and health-checks the socket every 10. If the connection dies it reconnects on its own, backing off from 1 second up to 30, for at most 5 attempts. After that it gives up and you need to re-enter the room. A clean exit, such as pressing Exit Room, does not trigger a reconnect.
Settings
The Settings tab controls what you see, not what you send. Seven toggles cover cursors, cursor labels, viewports, viewport labels, selection indicators, presence badges and toast notifications, plus a Show All / Hide All button. These preferences are stored in your browser only and never affect what other people see.
Read nextSharing and visibilityWho can open a space at all, before anyone joins a room.