Using the waiting room in Zoom

The waiting room is a useful feature of Zoom. If your meeting has a waiting room, when the invitees click on the link to attend the meeting, they do not come directly into the meeting. They will have to wait until they are let in by you as a meeting host or a co-host. This gives you better control over who actually attends the meeting. It reduces the possibility of unwanted participants and, for example, Zoom bombing.

You enable the waiting room in the scheduling window when you create the meeting, simply by checking that the Enable Waiting Room option is selected under Advanced Options. Read more about the choices in the sheduling window. As the meeting begins, the meeting host or co-host lets the participants in as they enter the waiting room. The host is notified when there is someone in the waiting room, and can also open a chat with those waiting if there is someone you are not sure of. 

• Click Admit to let participants into the meeting
• Click Remove to remove unwanted people from the waiting room. 
• Click Message to send a chat message to all who are waiting. 

Read more about waiting rooms in the Zoom knowledge base. If this is your first time using a waiting room, you may want to try it out in a test meeting with a colleague first. 

Prevent unwanted participants

Some unauthorized persons occasionally attempt to enter Zoom meetings to share or display unwanted material (Zoom bombing). Actual persons may try, or they can set up automated processes (robots) that try for them. These are typically "caught" in waiting rooms.

Look at the names of those who are waiting. Is it real name? Are those the ones you have invited to the meeting? If you are unsure, in Zoom you can send a chat message to all who are waiting, and ask them to tell who they are. Then you can let in the respondents. A robot cannot respond to such messages, so here you can "filter" it out.

UiO users are automatically admitted

In some cases, the waiting room is set up so that everyone who is logged in to UiO Zoom enters directly, and those who are not logged in have to wait. If you have that setting in your waiting room, you can send a message to those in the waiting room that if they are UiO students or staff, then they should use UiO Zoom. Feel free to send them a link to info on how they can check login and log in correctly.

Everyone at UiO should always use Zoom with UiO login, where privacy and security are better than in the free version of Zoom, and UiO has made key settings to further improve security.