I came to this popular thread from a google search (as did many others) and wanted to create a new discussion about this since Zoom support closed that thread without any solution or even seemingly clearly understanding the problem we are facing as users.
Here is my use case. I have a four year old who has several different Zoom classes with URLs that change somewhat frequently. Despite the fact that she cannot yet read, I have empowered her to login to her class herself by showing her how to open the calendar and simply click the meeting link. For some of her classes, the teacher has sent me the correct password-encoded url to join the class. For others, I’ve been given a zoom link and a seperate password. The latter scenario creates too complicated of a situation: she’s not going to be able to type a password into a dialogue box when her class starts, and I’m not going to be able to tech support all of her teachers who don’t provide the password-encoded URL. Since I didn’t create any of these meetings, I also don’t have access to that URL from the Zoom meeting setup screens. I need a way to create a single password-encoded URL from the separate inputs of the meeting URL and the password.
In the previously mentioned How to generate join URL thread, the final message from a developer advocate seemed to assume that we need to either decode encoded passwords or understand how the passwords are encoded. But this is not the case at all. We simply need some way of being able to create a single password-encoded URL for a meeting when we already have both the meeting URL and the password. Security-wise, I don’t see why having both the URL and the password or the password-encoded URL as being any different. Either way, I’m able to access the meeting, but the password-encoded URL is much more convenient for myself and many others, who simply want to be able to click a link to start the meeting.
As an idea for one potential solution, without exposing any details of how these URLs are generated, Zoom could create a screen that would allow a user to enter the meeting ID and the password seperately and generate the URL for us and this whole problem would be solved.
As for how relevant this issue is, please observe that the original thread I referenced is the 4th most viewed topic in your API forum, with over 40K views. It’s also the only topic in the top ten in that forum that was shut down without any possible solution or workaround.
Zoom, please reconsider providing a viable solution for this issue.
Thank you for sharing your use case for the need to generate a join_url given the meeting number and passcode. I totally understand the use case, and want to find a solution.
This is a great idea, but it would take some time to evaluate and develop.
In my opinion, this issue should be fixed at the core. Do you know if the teacher / school is using one of the Education Integrations?
If so, we can help make sure the integration is sending the meeting invites with the one click join url.
If not, we can help educate the teachers and others to include the one click join url, or make sending out meeting invites with the one click join url easier via a new feature or integration.
I appreciate your thoughts on troubleshooting my particular issue. It’s really not my place to get into the weeds with the technical administration of how my child’s school operates. We are fumbling through day-to-day operations with zoom classes for the four-year-old and making do. Mostly, my point was just that there are very legitimate frustrations and reasons why your end-users could really use an easy solution for this problem.
Thanks for your thoughtful response and for offering to re-evaluate this issue.
Thank you for revisiting this and for raising the importance of re-evaluating this from the Zoom side, @jmayhugh.
We appreciate the feedback and can certainly understand the frustrating experience this can present in use cases such as yours, where schools and students are at the core. We will be happy to share this with our Product and Engineering teams.
