meeting turns off after idle time

[meetinghost1213]

I have upgraded my account so that I can have/host meeting for up to 23 hours a day.

Once I walk out of the physical office and the call is inactive or an hour or so, the meeting turns off and it tells me "the meeting has ended after 40 minutes idle time". I would like the meeting to keep running even when there is no movement or conversation as we would like to come back and continue. Please help. 

Idle time meaning that the call had no interation.

[meetinghost1213]

please assist

[Frank_TB · Accepted solution]

Hello,

There are definitely defined disconnect times for idle time.

If you have an open Zoom meeting  you may have run into a problem where the meeting automatically terminates after 40 minutes of inactivity. This is normal behavior, there is no way to override the behavior.

If you have a Zoom meeting open, but no one has joined the meeting, the meeting will stay open for 24 hours. If someone has joined the meeting and then left, the meeting will terminate after 40 minutes of no activity. The meeting will end 40 minutes later if no one else joins.  As long as there are others in the session, you will not have the issue. 

Understanding time limits for Zoom Meetings

https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0067966 

Regards

If my reply helped, don't forget to click the accept as solution button!

[Bri]

Hi @meetinghost1213 ! I have reviewed your post and @Frank_TB (thank you! 🏆) has provided the solution, so I've gone ahead and marked it as an accepted solution. Please let us know if you have any additional questions!

[CindyGio]

@Bri I'm not sure how @Frank_TB 's answer was a "solution" as it doesn't offer any way to keep the meeting open after the 40-min of inactivity. This is a problem for my business as I host open co-working calls on Zoom that folks can drop in and out of over the course of a 12-hr day.

There's no way we can set/change this time limit? 

Can we get an actual solution instead of just a link to a Zoom support article that doesn't tell us how to work around this arbitrary limit that causes a real issue? 

[Flyvholm]

Unfortunately this is indeed a problem for those with drop-in hours for help/support, be it education or businesses. I can understand why Zoom would want to close inactive sessions and enable that behavior by default, but at least make it an option to keep sessions open for those who really need it.

I read in a different post ("Log out after 40 minutes") that admins can disable this in account security settings, so perhaps it is possible?

[leveragemaven]

That's a problem for my business.... any way to send zoom support a request to turn it off? Maybe enough people do that they have that option (or at least a longer time than 40 min).

[OSUWorkerBee]

Also a HUGE problem for us!! we regularly host "live" office hours using Zoom. Attendance varies widely depending on needs, but the time frame is always a minimum of an hour. We definitely need a fix here!! 🙂

[m0i]

I agree with the negative comments.  There are perfectly legitimate reasons to keep a session open for drop-ins.   In my case, I keep an open session for student questions during online exams.  Zoom may not want to help users in this way, but asserting that a policy that says that Zoom won't solve the problem is a "solution" doesn't respect users. 

I understand that keeping an open session uses up server resources, and that therefore Zoom has a reason to close down long-running sessions that have been abandoned, and are only accidentally left open.  But that's a reason to allow users to set a timeout, rather than a reason to impose an arbitrary timeout that they can't change. 

In my case, as soon as I notice that the session has timed out, I restart it.  In that case, Zoom is not saving any server resources, and in fact might be using more because of the cost of closing down and restarting.  However, it makes Zoom annoying.  It occasionally happens that a student has tried to join a Zoom session at the moment when it dies, and before I can restart it.

Some of my collaborators in Europe use Cisco Webex.  It didn't seem any better than Zoom, but if it has a better policy about long-running sessions, I would consider using it for exam support.  My organization uses Microsoft Teams, as well, so I might investigate whether that could be used for the same purpose.