Durbar: live audio rooms
Opening a live audio room, who can hear it, what it costs to listen, what recording means, and what happens to the replay afterwards.
A durbar is a live audio room. Someone opens it, a few people speak, everyone else listens, and the recording stays afterwards so nobody has to be free at the right hour.
The name is the West African public assembly, and that is the shape of the thing: a gathering where the community speaks and is heard.
Find them at /durbar. Open one from your dashboard, or from the page of the campaign, petition, event, job or community it is about.
What it costs to listen
About 14 MB an hour. Less than one song.
That figure is printed on the room before you join, and while you are listening the page shows what you have actually used. Durbars carry no video and the audio is encoded for speech rather than music, which is where the number comes from.
You do not need an account to listen to a public durbar, and you do not need the app. A durbar has a link, and the link opens in any browser.
You need an account to speak, to open one of your own, or to be reminded before a scheduled durbar starts.
Recording, and what it means
Most durbars are recorded. The host chooses when they open the room, and recording is on unless they turn it off.
You are told twice, and the second time is the one that matters:
- Before you join. The room says whether it is recorded, and the join button says so too.
- Before you speak. If you raise your hand and the host invites you up, you are asked to confirm again, because that is the moment your voice starts going into the file.
If you only listen, your voice is not in the recording. Your presence in the room is recorded as participation, which is ordinary and is not published as a list of names.
A recorded durbar becomes a public replay page that search engines can find. Anyone can play it and share it, and it stays up. If you would not want something you say to be findable later, do not say it in a recorded room.
An unlisted durbar is reachable by its link and is deliberately kept out of every listing and out of every search engine. It is the setting for a room you want to share deliberately rather than publish.
Who can hear it
The host picks one of four, when they open the room:
| Visibility | Who can join |
|---|---|
| Public | Anyone, and it appears in listings |
| Followers | People who follow the host |
| Connections | People the host is connected to |
| Unlisted | Anyone with the link, and it appears in no listing |
A durbar attached to a community can also be limited to that community's members.
Speaking
Listeners raise a hand, and the host invites them up. Nobody arrives already holding a microphone: a promoted speaker arrives muted and chooses when to talk.
The host runs the room from inside it. Approving or declining raised hands, muting a speaker, removing somebody, closing the room and ending it are all there while the durbar is playing, on the phone as well as the web.
To speak you need an account that is not brand new. This is deliberate: a live room is the hardest thing on the platform to moderate after the fact, so the account doing the talking has to have something to lose.
The app does everything the website does, talking included. On the Ardent mobile app you can browse durbars, listen in the background with your screen locked, create and schedule one, take it live, run it as host, speak in it, close it, end it, read the replay and its transcript, and report a room. This page used to say the talking needed the website. It no longer does.
On Android you are asked for the microphone at the moment you take the stage and never on the way in, because listening does not use it. Say yes to Bluetooth as well if you are on a headset: without it Android does not offer the headset's microphone to an app at all, and it gives no reason why.
Some phones, Tecno, Infinix and itel among them, stop apps when the screen goes off even while you are speaking. If yours is one of them the app tells you once, the first time you take the stage, and shows you where to allow it. We would rather say so than let a room go quiet on you.
A scheduled or live durbar can also be edited: its title, its start time, and whether it records. Recording locks once the room is live, because people agreed to a recorded room or an unrecorded one when they walked in, and that is not a decision the host gets to revisit halfway through.
Muting somebody, and removing them
These are different actions with different consequences, and the guide says so because the app used to blur them on one platform.
Mute silences a speaker and leaves them on the stage. Their microphone stops working, they are told the host muted them, and the host can give it back without them having to ask again.
Remove takes them off the stage entirely. They go back to listening, and returning to the stage means raising a hand and being invited up again.
Closing a room without ending it
A host can close a durbar to new listeners while it carries on. Everyone already there stays, and anybody who drops out on a bad connection can still get back in; only people who have never been in the room are turned away. It is reversible, and it is not the same as ending the durbar, which disconnects everybody and stops the recording.
Who is in the room
A durbar shows who is on stage with a ring around whoever is speaking, and a live count of everyone listening.
Speakers are named because they are talking in public. Listeners are only ever a number: the platform does not tell a room who is quietly in it, on either the web or the app.
The ring means the room is picking up your voice. It is not a promise that every listener's device is playing it: someone on a bad connection, or a browser that has not been given permission to make sound, can still be having trouble. If you cannot hear a room that says it is live, look for the prompt asking you to tap to start audio, which browsers sometimes require before a page may make any sound at all.
Large rooms
A durbar can hold thousands of listeners.
Past a certain number, listeners are served a broadcast stream that runs about 10 to 15 seconds behind the live conversation. It is not a downgrade so much as the reason a large room stays affordable to run, and if you are listening rather than speaking there is nothing to notice.
Afterwards
When the host ends the room, a recorded durbar becomes a replay:
- A page anyone can play and share, which stays up.
- Listed under Listen back wherever durbars are browsed, on the web and in the app.
- Announced to the host's followers, if the durbar was public.
- The people who were in the room are told the replay is ready.
A replay is not instant. The audio has to finish processing after the room closes, so the page appears a short while later rather than the moment the host ends the room. That is why the notification exists: you are told when it is actually ready, and you do not have to keep checking.
A room where nobody ever spoke has nothing to replay. Recording captures the voices in the room, so a durbar that opened and closed without anyone taking the stage produces no replay page. Nothing went wrong; there was simply no audio.
Durbars hosted before 8 August 2026 have no replay. A fault meant those recordings were never produced, and the audio does not exist to recover. It is fixed, and it affects only rooms from before that date.
Transcripts
Some replays carry an automatic transcript, so a durbar can be searched rather than only listened to.
Automatic transcripts get a lot wrong, especially names. The best available speech recognition is measured at roughly one word in four wrong on Ghanaian English, and worse on personal and place names. A transcript is a way to find a moment and jump to it, not a record of what was said.
Every line links back to the audio at that point. The recording is the record.
Reporting something
There is a report control in every room and on every replay. Reporting from inside a live durbar marks the moment, so a moderator lands on the right minute of the recording instead of scrubbing an hour of audio.
Reports go to the same moderation queue as everything else on Ardent.
What we cannot do is stop somebody saying a harmful thing while they are saying it. Nobody can, on any platform. What a recording does is make it attributable, reportable and answerable afterwards, and that is the honest description of the protection on offer.
What a durbar costs you to run
Nothing.
There is no fee to open a durbar, no charge to listen, no paid entry, no tipping and no gifts. Ardent takes no cut of a durbar because there is nothing to take a cut of.
If you want to charge for a session, run it as an event with a ticket. Event money settles through the organiser's own payment provider, and a durbar can be attached to that event.
Privacy
- A recording is kept for a set retention period and then swept.
- If your account is erased, the durbars you spoke in are removed with it, along with any transcript of them, because a transcript with no speaker labels cannot have one voice taken out of it.
- What is said in a durbar is not sold, is not used to train anything, and is not handed to anyone.
See the privacy policy for the retention period and the full statement.
Last updated: 24 August 2026
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