Hey Cory! CEO of Gather.Town here. Connection issues are always our top priority, and at this point, we're chasing down and squashing the last 1% of bugs. If you run into this in the future, reporting a bug will help us solve the issue! (Grape icon > send feedback/bug)

As for the other issue, active speaker detection is on our near-term roadmap. It's become more pressing for us too, as our team has grown and no longer fits in one page :P

Thanks for the feedback!