Seeing attendees while in practice session

[BIFHSGO]

Last year when using Webinars I could see the list of Attendees while I was in a practice session prior to opening the webinar. When testing my set up this year, I don't seem to be able to see the attendees until I start the webinar. Sometimes I want to promote an attendee to panelist before the webinar starts but I can't do that if I can't see who is waiting for the session to start. Has this changed? Can I no longer see Attendees waiting for the webinar to start? If it was changed, why? It was very useful seeing who and how many were waiting for the webinar to start.

[ZoomZoom]

Hi,

Only Hosts, Alternative hosts or panelists can join a practice session. This has always been like this:

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/206316975-Using-Webinar-practice-session

I believe you might be talking about waiting room? In a meeting you can have a waiting room enable, and as a host you can see who is in that room, and you can either allow them in one by one,  or all at once. But waiting rooms are only for meetings, not webinars: 

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115000332726-Using-Waiting-Room

[BIFHSGO]

I understand the difference between Meetings and Webinars and I know that attendees were visible to the host from the practice room a year ago, though I don't recall it being referred to as a waiting room. We are working in Webinars and those who need to come in as panelists get those invitations. However, last year when using Webinars I, as host of the webinar in the practice session, could see the list of people who had signed in as attendees and were waiting, outside of the practice session, for the webinar to start. If one of our panelists ended up coming in as an attendee, I could see them waiting there and promote them into the practice session as a panelist. This problem came up because we were using a recurring webinar for several sessions of a conference and, if the panelist attended another lecture as a mere attendee, then they could not get in again as a panelist but were banished to attendee-land for the rest of the recurring sessions. From what I can determine, this is still a problem if a panelist attends another session of a recurring webinar as an attendee using the same email as that attached to their panelist invitation. However, I will no longer be able to promote them into the practice session ahead of the start of the webinar - which we would want to do - because I can no longer see any of the attendees until the webinar has been started. It sounds like last year, webinars had a kind of waiting room for the attendees which the host could see but that feature has been discontinued since we last used webinars. Perhaps it is so thecompany can offer this feature elsewhere in their slate of features or perhaps they did not know how organizations like ours (a non-profit, volunteer-run, community organization) were using their products. If anyone sees this from the company, perhaps you could reconsider the removal of the visibility feature for attendees during the practice session. In the meantime, I am stressing to our volunteers and speakers to not use the email attached to their panelist invitation for entering as an attendee. If you have any other solution, I would be happy to hear it. Thanks for your reply.