This article is written for Google Workspace for Education Administrators.

Your students reuse old Google Meet codes to start their own Meets without any moderation, which could violate your school's communication policy. You need a way to "expire" these unmanaged Meet codes to block students from using them.

In contrast to a nicknamed meeting that expired after all participants left, a meeting without a nickname may last for months. A source from Google Meet support forum claims an un-nicknamed meeting expires after 90 days of no use. That theoretically implies a meeting can last forever if students keep reusing them. Another characteristic of these meetings is the Host Control > Quick Access was ON (which is a default option), that is, anyone in your school can join the meetings freely without host permissions.

There are no admin controls to force expire these links. Some schools tried to monitor and blacklist meeting codes manually via URL filtering but it's too much hassle. Meeting codes often leaked to students in various ways.

This article describe how Safe Doc blocks students joining these stale open meetings. If you have yet to install Safe Doc, please get a 30-days trial first.

How Safe Doc blocks students joining old Google Meets

When a student click a Google Meet link, they are put in a "waiting room". The waiting room allows students to prepare the video and audio settings before joining the meeting.

Safe Doc checks the meeting nickname and Quick Access setting. If the meeting has no nickname AND Quick Access = ON, Safe Doc redirects students to a Safe Doc blocked page. Otherwise, Safe Doc does nothing and the student is free to join or requests to join. The process can be explained in the follow demo video.

Block Students Joining Old Unsupervised Google Meetings

Notes

  • Safe Doc adds a 5 second waiting period in the "waiting room" before each student can join the meeting. This 5 second waiting period is configurable below.
  • Before you enforce the meeting blocking policy, please inform your teachers of the change. Ask your teachers to transition existing student-facing meetings into more secure nicknamed meetings only.

How to set up in Safe Doc?

First, you need to deploy Safe Doc and read Safe Doc Configuration.

Then add and set the policy BlockUnnicknamedMeeting to true to enforce the meeting blocking. If this policy is not set, the blocking is OFF.

"BlockUnnicknamedMeeting": {
  "Value": true
}

By default, this policy will wait for 5 seconds. If you find your students' nicknamed meetings are often falsely blocked, try to extend the wait time up to 15 seconds, using a new policy BlockUnnicknamedMeetingWaitTime. For example, let the students wait for 8 seconds instead of 5 seconds, add and set the policy BlockUnnicknamedMeetingWaitTime to 8. 

"BlockUnnicknamedMeetingWaitTime": {
  "Value": 8
}

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