Problems with pre-authenticating meeting users - do they have to be part of the account?

API and Webhooks
1

Description
Trying to use API to automate the creation of a restricted meeting, adding hundreds of registrants and then approving only these added registrants to access the meeting.

Error

[code] => 1001
[message] => User does not exist: anyemail@iuse.com.

Which App Type (OAuth / Chatbot / JWT / Webhook)?
Using JWT token

Which Endpoint/s?
meetings/{meetingId}/registrants

How To Reproduce (If applicable)
Data being sent (via cURL) to the add registrant endpoint for the existing meeting ID is pretty simple:

$data = array(
	"email" 		=> $email,
	"first_name"	=> $firstName,
	"last_name"		=> $surname
);

But always returns the “User does not exist” message. It would be great to get some clarity as to what I’m doing wrong. Do I need to add the user to my account first? That doesn’t seem to make (human) logical sense if so - these are hundreds of random people who are attending an event and I wouldn’t think should have any connection to my own account. Many (most?) of them will already have their own Zoom account, and some won’t.

What I’m trying to mimic with the API is looking up the meeting on the web portal, going to the Registration URL and filling this form out once for every single attendee, which as far as I can see is very much the manual approach to what I feel I am trying to automate - albeit perhaps wrongly - via the API.

Additional context
Thanks in advance for any help - one thing all my searching on this forum has at least made clear is that you guys are really helpful and responsive.

2

After diving into tons of support threads I found a couple that alluded to needing to turn off authentication profiles - this one (though related to a different error) and this one (which I think is inaccurate as I was getting “user does not exist” for an email address that IS a Zoom account) in particular.

Anyway, I’ve now managed to get this working by adding

"meeting_authentication" => false

to the API call that creates the meeting, i.e. disabling “Only authenticated users can join”.

Is this correct? It seems quite illogical that in order to turn on registration you have to turn off authentication.

This suggests that if you use registration to pre-authorise meeting participants then registering someone without a Zoom account means they can join the meeting without an account. If so, that’s fine - just want to get this straight in my mind and make sure I’m doing the right thing and not compromising meeting security in any way.

3

Hey @igloo,

Happy to hear you figured it out! :slight_smile:

Thanks for your feedback, we will work on making those errors more clear.

Yep, the purpose of registration is to distribute your registration page to anyone with or without a Zoom account. Then you can manually or automatically approve them to join the meeting.

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204619915-Scheduling-a-Webinar-with-Registration

Thanks,
Tommy

4

@tommy – this doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe I’m understanding this wrong.

If we want to add registrants with a zoom account (which is what the authentication-enabled option for the meeting represents, right?), but without an account in our organization, what can we do?

5

If you want to register participants by their email address, just make sure you aren’t using any other authentication profiles (e.g. participants must have a Zoom account or participants’ email addresses must be in the allowlist of specified domains) as these can mess with registration.

If you’re doing registration properly, you shouldn’t need any authentication profiles as the registration will be more precise than those authentication profiles can be.

This whole thing opened up a huge can of worms for us where we ended up discovering many more limitations to trying to have registered meetings on Zoom, but this is probably no longer the place for those issues.

1 Like
6

Understood. Thank you! I’ll see what we can do :slight_smile:

7

Thanks for your answer @igloo! :slight_smile:

Let us know if you have additional questions @pritam.

-Tommy

8

Hey @tommy,

Thanks for your response. We are now being forced to work with allowing users without a zoom account to register. In our previous process, the salespeople (who manually filled the registration form for our users) used the zoom account as an extra certainty that the email was valid. But now, we can’t depend on this while we’re trying to automate the process.

But I guess I have to accept that that’s what the Zoom API is, for now :slight_smile: If it does change, please let us know!

-Pritam

1 Like
9

Will do @pritam! :slight_smile:

Feel free to add this as a feature request here: #feature-requests

Thanks,
Tommy