Feature request to throttle hand raising

[sesquiannual]

The meeting I participate is announced publicly and occasionally has bombers come to disrupt the meeting. One of their tricks is to raise and lower their hand rapidly. Currently, that makes them jump around in the participant list and thumbnails, making it more difficult to select them and remove them.

A simple feature that would be helpful would be to have available is a throttle on raising hands so that after raising and lowering a user's hands multiple, say 3 times, within a threshold timeout, say 10 seconds, the bombers would be unable to raise their hands for a period. It would not need to be a very long throttle to be effective, perhaps even a minute block would be enough for the feature to be useful.

It would be a feature that would not have much impact on our intended participates because it is so temporary and is an exceedingly rare behavior for normal meeting attendees.

[storyhub]

Publicly publishing a meeting ID and its passcode is not a good practice. That is what Zoom Events and onZoom are designed to do.

[sesquiannual]

My understanding is that we can't use onZoom because we have attendees/hosts that are not in the US. Zoom events won't work in our situation because we can't ask attendees to need to register.  In addition, we don't have a budget to subscribe to the Zoom events service

Our use case allows attendees to come and leave whenever they want as well as speak in the meeting with minimal setup.

There are situations where one can't follow all of the recommended practices and disruptive users can be an unfortunate consequence. However, the requested feature would add to the toolkit available for hosts to manage any meeting where disruptive users come to their meeting. 

[ExpertswhoJohn]

@sesquiannual ,

I really suggest you lock down your Zoom meetings more. That is why Zoom expects a password nowadays. Your Zoom bombers can cause much more trouble than just raising their hands. I really suggest you enforce registration to put them off. You can also use the waiting room to change them. I have also run meetings in a breakout room, so you have a chance to admit people, see them, and speak with them before you move them into the breakout room to contribute to the meeting.

If you have an open meeting, you always want a host ready to hit the suspend activities button.
all the best

John

https://www.youtube.com/@boomwithlordzoom

[sesquiannual]

I agree they can do more disruption than just raising their hands, that is just one of their behaviors that they use to prolong their interruption and is easiest to adjust. We do all of the other steps we can do, disable unmuting yourself, reducing access to chat, using the waiting room, and prevent screen sharing. Disabling turning on one's camera would be an option but doing that makes the session less social.

It sounds like breakout rooms could be a second level of screening when the waiting room is on. Wouldn't it require an extra person supervising the meeting, one for the breakout room and one for the screening in the main meeting? Some attendees don't have a camera or are in a situation where they can only listen which would make them hard to validate. Also, the host may need to be using a mobile device which the documentation says is incompatible with controlling a breakout room.

The suspend activities button has the problem that once activated, the disruptors can't be distinguished from authorized attendees once their cameras and audio are disabled so that it can only be used in emergencies as a nuclear option, not something that is actually useful most of the time.  Some of our cohosts are pretty proficient at removing people but novices could use the help.

We have a basic requirement to allow people to find the meeting without contacting the organizers which allows bombers to attend as well since the meeting information is publicly released. Any feature to support the hosts of a meeting would be welcome. 

I suspect a raise hand throttle would be easier to implement than other ideas. Whether zoom staff find it worth including in their strategic plan would be nice to know. I wouldn't expect a promise that it would be done, but knowing that it was put on the list of topics under consideration would be valued.