Conference participation and presentation are core practices in research and professional communities. For individual participants they are places to learn about and share recent research findings and emerging practices, and to meet and network with colleagues. Extensive lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic meant that formerly face-to-face conferences had to rapidly move online, resulting in the development of hastily designed emergency remote conferences which were mostly unable to benefit from the knowledge held by organisers and researchers of pre-pandemic online conferences. As a result, many online conferences from 2020 were unable to make creative and effective use of readily available technologies to support the full range of formal and informal interactions needed to support participant and community level learning experiences during the conference. This article discusses this phenomenon and also describes a range of more creative and flexible online conference designs from the pandemic period that look well beyond the emergency remote conference.