How to Enable Waiting Rooms for Some Meetings but not Others

[BATSImprov]

I have a weekly recurring meeting that I want the waiting room enabled for. I don't want the rest of my meetings to have a waiting room enabled. However, the only thing I know how to do from the Zoom support article is enable waiting rooms for all meetings. Then, when I go into the individual meeting's settings, the checkbox is greyed out, i.e., I cannot edit it. This is so frustrating as I used to be able to choose which meetings had waiting rooms or not--it wasn't an account-level setting but rather an individual meeting setting. Can anyone help? Thanks so much!

[Ray_Harwood · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Zoom Community, @BATSImprov.

Sounds to me like you have the "Lock" button enabled at the Admin level.

Go back to the Admin -> Account Management -> Account Settings menu and type in Waiting Room in the search box at the top (this will save you time locating the option!).

Then look on the Meeting Waiting Room line... first, verify that the switch is Enabled (blue, not grey).  Then, over where the lock button is, make sure that the lock is UNLOCKED.

When the lock button is LOCKED, it FORCES the state of the enabled/disabled switch on all meetings.

When the lock button is UNLOCKED, it sets the initial state of every user's setting to the same setting as the enabled/disabled switch, but allows the user to change their default setting in the Personal settings area.

You can look at the Personal -> Settings in a similar way, by entering "waiting room" in the search box.  Then your Meeting Waiting Room will likely be "enabled", which becomes the default setting for any new Meetings created:

Then, as you probably already figured out but can't actually do until the Admin setting is UNLOCKED, you can set each meeting's Waiting Room to enabled or disabled as desired -- noting that you can't set the Waiting Room to disabled if you do not have Passcodes enabled.

[BATSImprov]

Hi Ray,

Thank you so much for your help! This is exactly what I needed to know. I appreciate your thorough explanation and screenshots which were also very helpful. Have a great day!

Best,

Will

BATS Improv