When something goes wrong on a Thursday Night

Symptoms are written the way you'd say them out loud, because when it's 8:05 and four people are waiting, that's all you have.

Nobody can get in

“Stuck connecting” — for everyone at once

Almost always the router forgot the port forward. Home routers purge their UPnP mappings between sessions; ours does it every time. The game re-claims UDP 7777 on every launch, so the fix is usually just quit and start the night again.

If it happens twice in a row, the host should look for a red on-screen warning. The game tells you which of the three claims failed, and there are only two real answers behind it:

• “router exposed no UPnP port-mapping service” — UPnP is switched off in the router. Turn it on (usually under Advanced → UPnP), or forward UDP 7777 to the host PC by hand.
• “Internet friends can't join in VR” with two different addresses — this is CGNAT or double-NAT, and it's your ISP's equipment, not yours. A port forward genuinely cannot help; the address the router forwards to isn't the one the internet can reach. Same-wifi joins and the web theater still work. Ask the ISP for a public IP, or host from a different connection.

One friend can't get in, everyone else is fine

Not the router — the router is either broken for everybody or nobody.

• In VR, and it fails instantly and silently: their controllers were asleep when the app launched. Wake both, then relaunch. This is the single most common one-person failure.
• They typed the code from the website: the website's room code is 4 characters and the join screen wants 7. They're different codes. The one to read out is the one on the host's Invite friends card.
• They're on your wifi and don't see you under Nearby nights: the host's discovery beacon may be leaving through the wrong network adapter — a VPN or a virtual switch. Quit anything like Tailscale, WSL or Hyper-V on the host and restart the night.

Friends outside your house can't join, friends inside can

The invite code is scoped. If the host's card still shows the amber “SAME WIFI ONLY” line under the code, the public address lookup hasn't answered yet — wait a few seconds and read the code again. A LAN code handed to someone on cellular can never work.

If the code is public and they still can't get in, it's the port forward or CGNAT — see above.

Windows is blocking friends

A router forward only gets the packet as far as the PC. Windows Firewall then gets its say, so a perfect port forward can still time out for everyone.

Recent builds ask Windows for permission themselves — approve the one prompt when it appears. If you missed it, or you're on an older build, run _ALLOW_SHARE_FIREWALL.bat as administrator (right-click → Run as administrator) once. You never need to do it again on that PC.

Sound

No voice at all — nobody hears anybody

The voice session didn't arm at startup. There's a self-heal poll that usually recovers it within a few seconds, so give it a moment before doing anything. If it doesn't come back, everyone leaves and rejoins.

Voice works but you sound wrong, or nobody hears just you

A phantom “Oculus Virtual Audio” microphone got selected. It looks like a real device and captures nothing useful. Pick your actual headset mic in Settings.

The film's audio drifts out of sync, or drops out periodically on Quest

Fixed in current builds. If you're seeing it, you're on an old build — check the version pill in the menu against what the host is running.

The screen

My shared window is black or blank

Several ordinary causes, in the order worth checking:

1. The share isn't actually armed. Check this first — it's free, and it's the answer more often than anything below.
2. Fullscreen-exclusive app. Capture can't see it. Switch the app to borderless windowed and it appears.
3. The app is running as administrator. A non-elevated capturer can't read an elevated window. Restart that app normally.
4. Laptop with two GPUs. The window renders on one GPU while capture runs on the other. Force both onto the same GPU in the graphics settings.
5. Per-window vs whole-display. Try sharing the whole display instead of the single window.

Web friends see no video

Either the tunnel didn't publish — quit and restart the night, the game brings up a fresh one each time — or they're behind a symmetric NAT that the direct path can't cross. Send them the tunnel link rather than an IP.

Motion posters show static artwork

The videoUrl in your poster config isn't a direct .mp4 or .webm link. A YouTube or Vimeo page URL won't work — it has to be a file the player can open directly. The static art is the fallback, so this fails quietly by design.

The movie won't seek — dragging the scrub bar does nothing

The file's being served without HTTP Range support. If you're serving it yourself, that's the setting to look for.

Performance

Everything is slow — low FPS across the whole PC, not just the game

An orphaned ffmpeg from an earlier share is still running. It quietly eats the machine system-wide. A watchdog is supposed to kill it; when that misses, end ffmpeg.exe in Task Manager. Restarting the PC also clears it.

Stuttering in the headset, but the host PC looks fine

It's the wifi air path, not the PC. Move closer to the access point, get off the 2.4 GHz band, and keep the headset off a congested channel. Nothing on the host will fix this.

Installing and updating

The store version won't install, and says nothing useful

You almost certainly have a copy we sent you directly. That one is signed with our key and the store's is signed with Meta's, so Android will not replace one with the other — it just declines.

Uninstall the copy you have first: in the headset, Apps → Thursday Night → ⋯ → Uninstall, then install from the Store.

Write down your avatar choices before you do it — they don't survive the swap.

Known bugs with no fix yet

Being straight about these is more useful than silence.

Still stuck?

Email support@thursday-night.com. Four things make it fixable instead of a mystery:

1. What you were doing when it went wrong — not just the error.
2. How many people were connected, and whether it hit one of them or all.
3. VR or web for whoever was affected.
4. The version from the pill in the menu, for the host and the affected friend. Version mismatches cause symptoms that look like something else entirely.