I’m part of a daily meeting in which the host (account holder) makes me a co-host, then I lead a breakout meeting in a breakout room. I use the desktop app. The host can mute individuals at will in the main conference. As co-host, I cannot mute individuals in the breakout room. The mic icon will show them muted for a couple of seconds but then automatically becomes unmuted again. I need this function so I can mute an individual who is disrupting a speaker with background noise without interrupting the speaker to ask them to mute themselves. Is there a way to do this?
Hello,
This is a very interesting question. Thank you!
First things first:
- The expressed behavior of individual mute is not specific to break out rooms or co-host. It works the same for the main conference and for the host.
- (Side note) For some reason breakout rooms made it more difficult (but not impossible) for host (and co-host) to execute mute command on a participant. We will fix that.
The mic icon will show them muted for a couple of seconds but then automatically becomes unmuted again.
What happened here is that the participant is indeed muted by co-host but he/she immediately unmuted self and thus you see the mute icon disappears.
So the main question you posed here is whether or not participant shall be able to self unmute if host explicitly muted him/her.
Our current answer is “Yes”, we allow participant to self-unmute if host individually muted him/her. This is true for main conference and the break out room.
In fact it used to be the other way around in the past and we got a bigger problem. Imagine a situation when participant was noisy for a brief time and host muted him. If participant is not able to self unmute - this is it. He has to drop and re-join the meeting if he wants to say something.
The main room and break out room have differences. In the main room the host can enable the “Lecture” or “Q&A mode”. In this case participants are not able to self unmute, but in case of the breakout rooms those features are not available. Breakout rooms considered “free for all” and do not necessarily require host to manage them.
What to do:
We are interested to hear your ideas on how to solve this problem.
- allow host to choose how to mute participant (soft or hard) ?
- execute hard mute on a participant if the main conference is in the “Lecture mode” ?
neither solution looks very appealing though.
Thank you,
Eugene.
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Thank you, Eugene, for your detailed response. I’ll give this some thought and see if I can offer any suggestions. I can see that not allowing people to self-unmute could be a bigger problem. I have no idea if this is technically possible but perhaps something like the host could place a small message on participant’s screen reminding them to mute themselves when they aren’t talking, or since we have many participants that join by a phone call and are audio-only, the host could press a button that would play a prerecorded audio reminder to the noisy participant.