Solved Newb needs help with MMS

Hi everyone - I am still searching for an acceptable way to send/receive SMS and MMS from my computer. Have installed Join on my LG V20 and the Chrome extension and all tests pass. I am having some problems and am confused about some things ...

(1) How did I get here? -- Somehow I got a tab open in Chrome at joinjoaomgcd. appspot. com/sms.html?deviceId=[long string here] for my phone device. How did I get this page open? I can't seem to reproduce how to get to this page.
UPDATE: I finally figured out how I got to this URL -- started from the joaoapps.com/join/ page and clicked "Join on the Web".

(2) Problems with the page at this URL (see #1 above) -- On this page, group messages show only the phone numbers of the participants, not names. (Names do show if I just stick with the little popup from the plug-in widget in the browser title bar). Also images/gifs don't show up at all and there is no "Click to show picture" option as there is in the title bar widget popup. Is this web page not supposed to be used at all perhaps? Why is it there?
UPDATE: Re "why is it there?" I now see that I could use the web page to interact with join from any browser, if I am not using my own computer. So it would be great to solve the problem with MMS not working (multi phone numbers display instead of names in group texts, no images available)

Most important one:

(3) How do I initiate a group message from the Chrome browser popup?
-- I click on the widget in my browser bar
-- I click on SMS/Phone, then on the +, and then on the pencil
-- Search for a contact and click on it. This opens the option to text this contact
-- How/where do I select another contact when I am actually trying to send a group message? Can't find this option.
UPDATE: I just found another post where this was asked and apparently it is not possible to initiate a group text from Chrome. :-(((((

Thanks for bearing with me!

kazar

 

Answered all my own Qs. Left my post here in case my updates help the next newbie.