Meeting chat now opens a separate thread for every participant when set to "Host and co-hosts" — how do we get the single consolidated chat window back?

I teach live online classes with a large number of participants. For years my workflow was simple: set chat to "Host and co-hosts", ask a question, and all the students' answers would come into ONE chat window where I could read them at a glance. Students could not see each other's answers, so nobody could copy.

After the new meeting chat UI and the new Zoom Web Experience rolled out on my account, every single participant's message now opens as its own separate one-to-one thread. With 50 or 100 students, I would have to click each person's name individually to read their answers. It is simply not usable in a live class.

What I have already checked, as the account admin:

- "Meeting chat - Private group messages" (the setting that used to fix this) has been REMOVED. It is not in my personal settings and not in Admin Center > Account Settings > Meeting > In Meeting (Basic).
- "Meeting chat - Direct messages" is already turned off on my account. The separate threads still happen.
- Turned off "Allow users to access meeting chats before and after the meeting", signed out of the desktop app, signed back in, tested. No change.
- Zoom Support confirmed this is now by design. Ticket TS2444739 has been raised with their internal team.

On the reason given for the change:

Support says this was done for privacy. But there was never a privacy problem. In the old design, a private message to the host appeared ONLY in the host's own chat window, marked as a direct message. No other participant could ever see it. So the new design has not protected anything that was exposed before — it has only made the host's job far harder.

What we are asking for:

Do not remove the new separate threads. Just give the host a choice. Add a toggle: "Show all participant messages in one window." Those who prefer threads keep threads. Those of us teaching large groups get our workflow back.

To everyone else hitting this:

Please reply below with (1) what you use Zoom for, (2) roughly how many participants, and (3) how this change has affected you. And please LIKE the original post. Individual complaints get ignored; a thread with volume does not. Several of us have already raised tickets — if you have a ticket number, post it here too.

Zoom team — this has been raised repeatedly in this community since mid-2025 and is still unresolved. Please give us the option back.