Setting up a 24/7 Zoom Meeting

Welcome to the Zoom Community, @jaimie1.

Unfortunately, Zoom is a place where people schedule their own meetings. If you need a common area where anyone can gather, I suggest you try using Discord or some other tool.

A Basic account is indeed limited to 40 minutes per meeting. Even with a Pro account, your meeting duration is limited to 30 hours, and requires that someone be present in the meeting at all times. If you start the meeting, You can designate a new Host to inherit the Meeting after you leave, but that person must in turn do the same when leaving. 

I can hell you if that's okay

There’s really no trick to it other than the requirement for the meeting Owner to be a Licensed account, but there are two approaches:

1. Start a meeting and make sure there is always a host and one or more people present. This Meeting can run continuously up to 30 hours, and would need to be restarted by ending the meeting for all or running up against the 30-hour limit, at which time Zoom force-quits the meeting
2.  Create a meeting with:
   • Recurrence set to “No fixed time”
   •  Join Before Host enabled and set to Any time
   • Waiting Room must be disabled

With the second approach, when everyone leaves the meeting, it will end … but if anyone wants to join the meeting, it will start up again. Anyone that is not the owning Host will enter the room as an unprivileged participant – there will be no meeting Host, unless and until the Host arrives, or if you provide a trusted participant with the Host Key who uses the Claim Host process. I do not recommend using the Host Key in this case, except with a very trusted person. A Meeting started with this approach also will be force-quit by Zoom if it runs continuously-attended for 30 hours. 

Also note that while this meeting is in progress, the owning Host will not be able to Host a separate meeting without causing the in-progress meeting to be terminated. 

Zoom will force-quit meetings that have been idle. See this Zoom Support article for details:

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/202460676-Time-limits-for-idle-meetings 

One more note: For Basic accounts with a 40-minute Meeting limit, once the meeting is force-quit by Zoom, there is a 10-minute wait period before being able to start a new Meeting. I’ve not heard whether there is a Waiting period after a 30-hour (Licensed account) meeting is force-quit. If you try this approach, come back here and let us know!