Will Zoom ever let people see chat comments posted before they joined the call?

[burke]

Zoom has been awesome for remote work, but it has always been annoying that participants can only see chat comments posted after they join a call. Because of this...

• Links to meeting minutes get posted to chat multiple times at the start of meetings so people who joined later can see them.
• When introductions are done in chat, people joining a few minutes late don't see introductions they missed.
• When switching a Zoom call between phone and laptop, chat history if lost.
• If you get dropped from a call and re-join, you lose all of the chat history.
• It's not clear who can see which parts of the chat when not everyone was on the call from the beginning.

Ideally, the chat history for a Zoom call (i.e., all chat comments to everyone since the call started) would be visible to everyone else, regardless of when they joined (or re-joined) the call. A host could post a link to meeting minutes and not worry about latecomers not having the link.

Will Zoom ever let people see chat comments posted before they joined the call?

[mmireault]

I agree- I would also love those chat comments to persist even in breakout rooms. So many times someone is sent to me in a breakout room to assist and they have to repost their comment or link for me to investigate during my office hours daily. 

[burke]

If it's not technically possible to allow participants to see the full chat history when joining a call after chat has started, then could Zoom at least make it easier to see who can (or cannot) see existing entries in the chat? For example, if I'm ten minutes into a Zoom call with a dozen people who joined the call over the first five minutes and there's a link in the chat shared several minutes ago, how do I know if I need to post it to the chat again?

A couple of suggested features to work around the inability of people to see chat entries posted before they joined a call:

1. Within the context menu for any entry sent to everyone add an item like "4 people missed this" that, when clicked, would show me the list of attendees who joined after the chat entry was posted.
2. Add an option to unhide/hide entries in the chat history showing when participants joined. For example, imagine if every time someone joined the call a subdued entries were added to chat like "Bob joined the call" that were hidden by default and you could toggle them on. Then it would be easy to see who missed a chat entry by toggling on the "Show when people joined" option in chat and see if anyone joined after the chat comments were posted.

Alternatively, Zoom could just show the full public/everyone chat history of a call to all participants regardless of when they join a call, none of this would be needed, and you could switch devices without losing the chat history.🙂

[edonovan]

Is this still the case or have they added a feature to address this?

[AuntieEm]

When using Zoom for multiple interviews: the candidate is in the waiting room until the interview panel is ready for them. I can send the candidate a chat asking them to stand by. When the next candidate is in the waiting room, I don't want them to see the first chat - they'd see the other candidate's name ad all confidentiality would be broken! So for my purposes I don't want the chat to be visible to newcomers.

[meriment]

You could pin the link to the meeting minutes in the chat multiple times during the meeting. If you want to automate this there is a Zoom app, Salepager, that lets you pin a message or link to the display of the Zoom meetings for all participants to join regardless of when they join the meeting.