A "doorbell" for the waiting room of a zoom meeting

February 4, 2021 5:30 PM

For security reasons, I use a waiting room for my one-on-one zoom meetings. The problem is when I've started the meeting and I am waiting for the other person. Instead of just starting at myself on the screen while I wait, I often look away to do something else. When the person finally enters the waiting room, the "allow" button shows up on my screen but I don't see it unless I remember to constantly look up and check. Is there any way to add an auditory signal for the waiting room?

I asked the Zoom support staff. There is an option to get a sound where people enter the actual meeting but not from the waiting room. In fact their response was - "can't do it but it's a great idea, we will add to the list of feature requests."

My previous conference software let me get a text message when someone entered the waiting room. It was great - my watch and my phone would both alert me within a few seconds of someone showing up.

There is there any way to hack this? Or do I have to just train my brain to keep glancing at the screen every 20 seconds?

posted by metahawk to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

I don't think you can, but could you allow someone else in the mtg to cohost and let people in for you?
posted by aetg at 5:39 PM on February 4, 2021

You can enable a setting where it emails you when someone enters the room, that’s what I use to let me know when to go back and admit folks. I just turned on push notifications for email to my phone.
posted by assenav at 5:53 PM on February 4, 2021

Response by poster: Assenav - The emails happen if they show up before I have even started the meeting. If I started the meeting but they are hanging out in the waiting room, no emails don't happen. But I could wait to start until they are there, so the emails got triggered but only if there was a way to get push notifications only about the zoom emails - I don't want all my emails showing up on the phone.

FYI - These are just two person meetings, so no need for a co-host. Once the other person shows up, we are good to go - I just don't want to accidentally leave them hanging out in the waiting room for a few minutes because I got caught up in something else.
posted by metahawk at 6:03 PM on February 4, 2021

Your question baffles me. From Day 1 with the Zooming, I start my meeting, with waiting room enabled, and as each of my students enters the waiting I
1) see your "allow" button (with their name) and
2) hear an audible, distinctive Zoom chime.
Maybe something with your hardware? I've never had to turn this alert on/off so don't know which setting controls it. My wife doesn't enable the waiting room with her classes, and her computer emits the same sound, after new students join a meeting. We have Windows laptops.
posted by Rash at 6:18 PM on February 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

When someone enters the waiting room for my meetings, it makes a "donk donk" sound, but it's always done that so I'm not sure how to turn it on or off. There is a setting that you can access from the Zoom.us web page titled "Sound notification when someone joins or leaves" that may or may not also control the waiting room sound. That's the only thing I could find that makes sense.
posted by rakaidan at 6:24 PM on February 4, 2021

Best answer: I teach in zoom, and all my students join the waiting room before I begin class. Here’s what I do:

Start the meeting and immediately mute audio/video (not related to this, just good practice for me).
Click “Participants” in the bottom row, under the video window. This opens a new window/frame.
Click “More” in the Participants window, bottom right side.
Select “Play Join and Leave Sound”

Now, every time a student joins and enters the waiting room, it plays a sound. Another sounds gets played when I admit them to the meeting.

I rely on this especially when I host office hours but have other stuff to work on.

Maybe this is a feature in the corporate/education version? I dunno. Happy to send screenshots or video if you have questions.
posted by malthusan at 6:27 PM on February 4, 2021 [13 favorites]

Yeah, my understanding is that you have to have "Play sound when participants join or leave" enabled; that basically there is no separate control for the waiting room versus the meeting.
posted by sm1tten at 7:01 PM on February 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is a feature they really should have, and it should be easy/obvious to enable for waiting room only. I want it too.
posted by amtho at 7:36 PM on February 4, 2021

A professor I know posted on facebook earlier today that they had just found the feature malthusan notes above, to use for when they are holding office hours. The ensuing conversation seemed to bear out that it's a thing you want to turn on or off depending on use case (great for office hours, bad for a large lecture class) so it's probably off by default for you?
posted by pixiecrinkle at 7:39 PM on February 4, 2021

Response by poster: Thank you!
Malthusan is right - thank you for the very specific instructions. Zoom hides things in weird places. As a bonus, since I am my own administer, I can set the default to be turned on now that I know what I need. You all made my life a little less stressful!

No idea why Zoom support couldn't answer this question but makes me appreciate the Metafilter community all the more.
posted by metahawk at 7:59 PM on February 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

This new report on Zoombombing may be relevant to your question:

Our findings indicate that the vast majority of calls for zoombombing are not made by attackers stumbling upon meeting invitations or bruteforcing their meeting ID, but rather by insiders who have legitimate access to these meetings, particularly students in high school and college classes. This has important security implications, because it makes common protections against zoombombing, such as password protection, ineffective. We also find instances of insiders instructing attackers to adopt the names of legitimate participants in the class to avoid detection, making countermeasures like setting up a waiting room and vetting participants less effective. Based on these observations, we argue that the only effective defense against zoombombing is creating unique join links for each participant.

If these are one-on-one meetings where you're generating unique links+passwords for each meeting and sharing them privately, I'm not sure you're getting much benefit from the waiting room and might just as well turn it off for these types of meetings (while keeping it for larger meetings where you want to try to vet attendees if the people you're having one-on-ones with are known to you and aren't likely to invite griefers.
posted by zachlipton at 8:58 PM on February 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thank you so much for this question! I've been having the exact same problem and now it's solved!
posted by pleasant_confusion at 10:32 AM on February 5, 2021

Thanks for asking this question - I've been switching between Zoom and Webex (which had this feature on by default) and this post finally prompted me to dig for the setting in Zoom.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:40 PM on February 5, 2021