Trying to help my town public meetings avoid random internet jerks joining the Zoom and spamming racist stuff.
How do these kids usually find public Zoom meetings to harass?
Trying random IDs?
Searching/scraping the web for Zoom links?
What do other places do with public Zoom meetings to minimize this?
@marcoarment Seems an URL Shortener would only obscure the meeting password by one step.
A public link is a public link- I suppose a url shortener could allow analytics of who clicked on it (it’s own privacy issue?)
@marcoarment I could be wrong because Zoom is confusing, but I think requiring pre-registration is an option even for normal (non-webinar) meetings: https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0065026 (at least this is true of my enterprise account)
It is no silver bullet, but at least you can check for suspicious email addresses ahead of time.
@marcoarment Webinar is really the only way to have admin controls. I ran this for our association during COVID and it worked well enough.
It was also a low enough bar that our older members were able to join (Florida).
I help run Zoom for our Sunday church services with about 50 or 60 Zoom attendees. We use the waiting room feature. Anyone not recognized can maybe have a few questions asked. As someone else mentioned, we also turn on most of the restrictions (don’t allow people to unmute themselves, no whiteboard or screen sharing, etc). During open comment time, people can raise their virtual hand and the host can unmute them, and be quick with the mute button if the speaker is an ass.
@marcoarment wondered this myself. We tried to mitigate it a little for iOS Dev Happy Hour by making people register in order to get the link. Only helps a little.
The strangest interaction ever was when one of the jerks who had been screaming and making random noises avoided getting kicked out (we can have well over 100 people so it can be hard to spot them if they only make the noise for a second). He ended up listening to one of our speakers, and apologized because he enjoyed the talk. 😵💫😵💫
@marcoarment It’s the embedded password in the link, people crawl the web and mine other sources for zoom links and then join for fun.
Some tips!
1. New zoom link every month instead of reusing the old link (if a password leaks once, you’re hosed)
2. Do not include the password in the link. It’s slightly less convenient, but when the link leaks you’re still ok
3. If possible, only allow invitees in without the waiting room and make others be admitted (requires a human to let them in)
@marcoarment it’ll only help if the true link never leaks! But if you’re rotating passwords it should be fine.
It’s not just your problem: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/10/dont-let-zombie-zoom-links-drag-you-down/
@ismh @marcoarment this is how we managed my daughter’s birthday over Zoom back when lockdown first started.
Shared the link to her school friends on FB then monitored the waiting room to allow legit folks into the party
@marcoarment a few things worked for us at the start of the Zoom era for “open” meetings:
- attendees must preregister using either Zoom itself or another product like Eventbrite
- mail registrants the meeting ID (unique for every meeting open to the public) and the
- unique password for every meeting (that is open to the public)
- only allow verified Zoom accounts to join the meeting
Never had an issue since. Preregistration is not a forté of Zoom Bombers
@marcoarment I have done lots of managing of large Zoom meetings, but never used the webinar product because the person paying never could front the cost.
I would make sure that the waiting room is enabled so that people need to be admitted. (Not sure if that works in this case since the person managing it might not know the names of attendees, or they might not have their name in Zoom.)
You can also restrict people from unmuting themselves without permission.
The Charlottesville City Council has decided to suspend virtual public comments during public meetings after anonymous callers zoomed into a council meeting earlier this month and made racist remarks
@caseyliss @marcoarment I don’t see how you can avoid this with anything publicly accessible.
This is no different than being able to just attend these in person and doing it.
The difference is that they don’t have the guts to do that.
@maddox @caseyliss @marcoarment Part of the problem is that it actually is quite different:
For someone to do this in “real life” they’d at least have to show up to Marco’s small town. Presumably most trolls wouldn’t actually have the means to do that (both time and money).
The internet lowers the barrier, it’s globally accessible.
@davidr I have zero tolerance for this.
Charlottesville is an AMAZING city, which is VERY liberal. I lived there for four years. Just because a bunch of fucking racist chodes descended on Charlottesville does not make it a racist supercenter.
I get you're just trying to crack wise, but, no. Not having it.
@davidr I wish I knew. It was handled very poorly. But in the defense of CPD, I don’t think we realized how awful Trump and his minions were yet.
I’m sorry for popping off, but this really chaps my ass. I know you didn’t mean anything by it — I’d have probably made the same joke. But I hate to see a city I love dragged thru the mud.
(I say this as a Hokie; Charlottesville is the home of our rivals!!)
🍻
When COVID hit I had find a solution to this for the school board district I worked at. And very quickly.
My solution was 2 different meeting rooms. One for the board members and staff only. This 1 fed a YouTube live stream…
2nd room was for public input. Folks had to pre register. (How they got the join link) Moderated by staff, who cued folks up by pinning the desired speaker and overriding guest audio & video permissions.
Another Staff person routed the output of this 2nd meeting into the 1st. A dedicated computer screen sharing meeting 2 (full screen) as a video feed into 1. This staff person also had control of gate keeping the signal from 2 into 1. Only enabling it when it was called for…
Now of course my department was in video production and we had a broadcast control room and all the necessary toys and staff to make magic happen. But with enough consumer/ prosumer gear, staff and spare computers one can make this work.
@marcoarment Maybe worth reaching out to Zoom to ask if they’d give a steep discount for public meetings.
Another more involved and harder for you and users option is to use an open source conference app like Jitsi https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ that actually works fairly well in Chrome and I think they have apps to support mobile.
Not as familiar to users as Zoom but it may give you wide ability to control the meeting and be less expensive.
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