We understand that an SDK Bot with an OBF token cannot join a meeting until the user associated with the token has joined. In this scenario, the SDK log is expected to output “join error code: 1 (Failed to join the meeting)” repeatedly until the associated user joins.
With Waiting Room Enabled (Expected Behavior)
When the waiting room is enabled, the behavior works as expected: “join error code: 1” is returned, and the Bot successfully joins after the associated user enters the meeting. We have confirmed this is the correct behavior.
Without Waiting Room (Suspected Bug)
When the waiting room is disabled and the user associated with the OBF token has NOT yet joined the meeting, we have observed the following behavior when the Bot attempts to join:
Pattern A: Instead of receiving “join error code: 1,” the Bot immediately receives “This meeting has been ended by the host,” and the process terminates.
Pattern B: Initially, “join error code: 1” is correctly returned. However, after some time elapses, “This meeting has been ended by the host” appears, and the process terminates.
Additional Testing Results
Through further investigation, we confirmed that this error is not limited to the Bot. Even when a regular user (not using the SDK) attempts to join the meeting, the same “This meeting has been ended by the host” error occurs under the combination of “Allow participants to join before host: ON” and “Waiting room: Disabled.”
This suggests that the issue may not be specific to OBF tokens, but rather caused by the “Allow join before host + No waiting room” setting combination itself. The Bot appears to be affected as a consequence of this same underlying behavior.
Suspected Cause
When “Allow participants to join before host” is enabled and the waiting room is disabled, attempting to join the meeting before the host has joined may be triggering a bug where the meeting is treated as ended, resulting in the “This meeting has been ended by the host” error for both regular users and Bots.
Expected Behavior
Regular users: If “Allow participants to join before host” is enabled, users should be able to join the meeting before the host regardless of whether the waiting room is enabled or not.
SDK Bot with OBF token: Regardless of the waiting room setting, the Bot should consistently receive “join error code: 1” until the associated user joins, allowing the Bot to retry and wait.
Questions for the Zoom Team
Is this a known issue with the “Allow join before host + No waiting room” combination?
If you have any insights or leads, we would greatly appreciate your guidance.
If this is a known issue, we would appreciate a fix. Thank you.
We would like to share the results of our additional testing.
Through further investigation, we have identified that this issue appears to be related to the combination of “Allow participants to join before host: ON” and “Waiting room: Disabled.”
Specifically, under this setting combination, even a regular user (not a Bot) attempting to join the meeting encounters the same “This meeting has been ended by the host” error.
This suggests that the issue is not specific to OBF tokens or the Bot itself, but rather that the setting combination is causing the error, and the Bot is simply affected as a result.
Additionally, we have observed that this issue does not occur every time, but rather intermittently.
If this setting combination prevents the Bot from joining meetings properly, we would like to request that this be addressed as a bug fix. Alternatively, if the combination of “Allow join before host + No waiting room” is considered unsupported or deprecated, we would appreciate it if you could let us know. This will help us determine our approach going forward.
Hi @nk1516
Thanks for reaching out to us.
I am currently looking into this issue (ZSEE-195643 internal ticket number for reference)
I will get back to you as soon as I have more upddates
Thank you for your response and for looking into this.
As requested, here are the Meeting IDs where the Bot exhibited the reported behavior (receiving “This meeting has been ended by the host” under the “Allow participants to join before host: ON” and “Waiting room: Disabled” settings):
Hi @nk1516
Thank you for your patience here. We are still investigating this issue.
In the meantime, our Engineering team suggested the following:
Advise the developer to implement retry logic in the SDK when this error occurs
Retry joining after several seconds, as intermittent state propagation issues may resolve through forced reattempts
I will keep you updated as soon as I have more information
Thank you for your reply and for sharing the advice from the development team.
Regarding the developers’ advice, we have already implemented a retry mechanism in our SDK Bot for when it receives “Join Error Code: 1 (Failed to join the meeting).” However, the core of this issue is that the Bot eventually receives the message “This meeting has been ended by host”, which makes further retries practically impossible. Since this message indicates that the meeting has actually ended, we cannot safely continue retrying because we cannot distinguish it from a scenario where the host genuinely ended the meeting.
To clarify the exact situation once again:
Condition: A Zoom meeting is set to “Allow participants to join before host: ON” and “Waiting Room: OFF”. An SDK Bot with an OBF token tries to join this meeting first (while the host and other users are still absent).
Symptom: The Bot correctly receives “Join Error Code: 1” a few times and executes the retry process. However, even though no other members have joined, it eventually gets the message “This meeting has been ended by host” and the process terminates.
Furthermore, I would like to emphasize again that this issue is not limited to the SDK Bot. We have confirmed that when general users (including the host user) try to join a meeting with these exact settings, they occasionally receive several error modals and cannot join the meeting. This happens probabilistically.
Could you please investigate if there is an underlying bug on the Zoom system side caused by the combination of these three factors?
“Allow participants to join before host: ON”
“Waiting Room: OFF”
"An SDK Bot with an OBF token trying to join the meeting "
We would really appreciate it if your team could continue investigating this issue based on these points.
