The Challange of Disruption to Zoom Meetings
There are places where Zoom bombers can still be disruptive to meetings. Those with an open-door policy to new guests are the ones most targeted. Support groups, open houses and town hall-style meetings are the most common where I see problems.
For more situations, there are things you can do in Zoom settings to mute people. This includes blocking specific actions or taking actions when problems occur.
However, these disrupters are always looking for new ways, and a common one in 2025 is to raise and lower their hands repeatedly. This causes an issue because raising a hand will cause Zoom to react by placing you at the top of a participant’s list and also at the top of the gallery view. With the lower hand, put yourself back down the list; you can repeat this to jump around the screen.
On the downside, there is no current way to block this action. And, many groups would not want to stop reactions in the meeting, as they are a great way to give feedback to a speaker.
After being shown this problem, I realised that there are API System calls associated. It would therefore be possible to create a simple Zoom App to monitor this hand-raising and take action against those abusing the system.
Hence, the Hand Raised Monitor was conceived.
This app has taken five weeks to develop, as it had to be added to the existing schedule. There are many installation, testing, documentation, and verification tasks needed to release an App into the Zoom Marketplace.
I would like to thank the marketplace team for their support and guidance throughout this process. I have more sophisticated apps in development, so the experience will help me release them later this year. Also, thank you to the Zoom Developer Forum Team for their support.
