Block Students Joining Old Unsupervised Google Meetings

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.

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. These unnicknamed meeting codes are often from ad-hoc meetings and leaked to students in various ways.

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

Block students joining un-nicknamed Google Meets

When a student clicks 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. If the meeting has no nickname, 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 following demo video.

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
}