Ways to help stop the Zoom Intruders

As an advocate for arthritis and a Facilitator to the Live Yes Connect Group and Founder of the International Support group Avascular Necrosis-Osteonecrosis Support Int’l

I use Zoom a lot: as a person back in school I again use Zoom a lot: talking with family , friends and attending other meetings yep zoom again ! So it’s great to have tips to have a more secure meeting, because we all know there will be some clown or troubled individual- intruding in a meeting.

Here are things I do and have learned in my zoom calls to stop ZB aka Zoom Intruders

Ways to have a safe meeting.

Always always always make sure your Zoom Account is up to date. Here’s how – Sign in to Zoom desktop client. Click your profile picture then click Check for Updates. If there is a newer version, Zoom will download and install it.

Create a waiting room –

The Waiting Room is just like it sounds: It’s a virtual staging area that prevents people from joining a meeting until the host is ready. Meeting hosts can customize the Waiting Room settings to gain further control over which participants join a specific meeting and when.

When it comes to video conferencing security best practices, Waiting Rooms are extremely useful for protecting meetings that have external participants

Only have one person screen share
Stop other participants from screen sharing
Click the arrow next to “Share Screen” in the host controls at the bottom of the Zoom screen, then select “Advanced Sharing Options” and make sure the option to “Who Can Share?” is set to “Host Only”.

Lock the room once meeting starts or with in a couple minutes after it starts – If you start a meeting and everyone you expect to join has, you can lock the meeting from new participants. While the meeting is running, navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Participants. The Participants panel will open. At the bottom, choose More > Lock Meeting.

If a non welcome person comes in You can kick them out.

To kick someone out: During the call, go to the Participants pane on the right. Hover over the name of the person you want to boot and when options appear, choose Remove.
By default, an ousted guest cannot rejoin. What to do if you make a mistake? You can allow a booted party to rejoin. Enable this feature by going to the web portal and navigating to Settings > Meeting > In-Meeting (Basic). Toggle on the setting called Allow removed participants to rejoin.

Disable Someone’s Camera
Hosts can turn off any participant’s camera. If someone is being rude or inappropriate on video, or their video has some technical problem, the host can open the Participants panel and click on the video camera icon next to the person’s name.

Prevent Animated GIFs and Other Files in the Chat
In the chat area of a Zoom meeting, participants can share files, including images and animated GIFs—if you let them. If you’d rather not, then be sure to disable file transfer. It’s on by default, so you have to actively disable it.
For your own meetings, open Settings in the Zoom web app (it’s not in the desktop app). On the left side, go to Personal > Settings. Then click In Meeting (Basic). Scroll down a little farther until you see File Transfer. That’s where you can disable it.

Turn off File Transfer
This will stop jerks from uploading porn through the in-meeting text-chat function. Go to Account Management > Account Settings > Meeting > File Transfer.
The Zoom blog posting has many more tips, including a few that are for paid Zoom accounts only, such as making the meeting invitation-only and requiring attendees to log in with a password.

I know many accounts are free so there is a time limit of I think 60 minutes . But there are excellent ways to secure a meeting.

Some will always fall through the cracks but it’s an excellent way to have a more secure meeting.

Wishing you a happy pain free day 🌸

Deb