Feature Request: Ability to Disable Waiting Room Mid-Meeting

[dat136]

Hi Zoom Community,

I’m a longtime Zoom user and paying customer, and I want to raise a concern about the rigid controls around the Waiting Room feature. While I understand the importance of security, the current setup creates significant challenges for real-world use cases, particularly for large webinars and meetings.

My Situation:

•I recently hosted a webinar with over 400 participants.

•I wanted to use the Waiting Room at the start of the session to admit my initial group of attendees.

•However, I found that I couldn’t disable the Waiting Room mid-meeting, meaning I had to manually admit participants throughout the entire event.

This was incredibly disruptive and impractical, especially as a presenter trying to focus on delivering content.

Why This is a Problem:

•The option to disable the Waiting Room during a meeting is grayed out, forcing me to manage admissions manually for latecomers.

•I understand the focus on “one security measure,” but this is unnecessarily rigid for scenarios that don’t require extreme security.

•Many users, like me, need flexibility in how we manage the Waiting Room feature—starting with it enabled but disabling it later on to streamline the session.

Suggested Solutions:

1.Allow hosts to toggle the Waiting Room on and off mid-meeting.

2.Offer a time-based auto-disable option (e.g., the Waiting Room automatically turns off 10 minutes after the meeting starts).

3.Reconsider the “one security measure” rule—it’s overkill for many non-sensitive meetings and webinars.

Why This Matters:

For professional users managing large groups, the inability to disable the Waiting Room mid-meeting creates unnecessary friction and diminishes the user experience. It’s not just an inconvenience—it actively undermines our ability to use Zoom effectively.

I’m hoping Zoom will prioritize this kind of flexibility in future updates. In the meantime, has anyone else experienced this issue, and are there any additional workarounds you’ve found helpful?

Looking forward to hearing from others and hopefully seeing some improvements soon!

Thanks,

David

[meriment]

You can use APIs to trigger a change to the waiting room settings of a meeting at a pre-specified time e.g. 10 minutes into the meeting. If you are not a developer there is a Zoom app, Salepager, that lets you schedule changes to a meeting including enabling or disabling a waiting room when scheduling Zoom meetings.