Character limit for Location on Zoom Links

[mpara17]

It gets annoying at times having to constantly use a URL shortener (ie tinyURL) in order to copy and paste your zoom link under the "locations" section since you're only given a 60 character limit and always have to paste it under the description for the full link than describing the problem the student is facing on the queue.

With that, I'm suggesting to remove (or lengthen) the character limit in order to accommodate for full Zoom Link URLs

[echuber2]

@nwalters512 Is there a buffer overrun risk somewhere with increasing these constants to 500?

@mpara0 Can you share more about how you're using Zoom links in the location? If students are sharing Zoom links where they wish staff to meet them, it's not terribly secure on non-private queues as anyone could join; restricting to Illinois accounts would be an essential first step. Preferably, if I were a student, I'd email the staffer with the meeting link, or have the staffer email the student with a join link.

[mpara17]

Well, only uiuc students are able to access the queue. The thing is in one of my classes they make you include a location "siebel basement or zoom url" and you need a "descriptive" title for your problem that you need to include to get help during office hours and not just including the zoom link since staff will remove you on the queue if you don't input your request properly.

I'm including a reference of what I'm talking about - hopefully it makes sense

[echuber2]

I understand. I wish the instructor would not make this requirement because it's not really in line with various other best practices. (To clarify about restricting to Illinois students, although only Illinois students can peek at the "public" queues, someone could grab a Zoom link and access it without using their proper Illinois login, to create mischief. So it's best to require Illinois authentication on your Zoom meeting settings too.)

We can try to implement this change but it won't be in the next few days, unfortunately; if it's causing major hangups, I'd recommend pointing your professor to this thread so they can understand the issue better. The professor could have a single Zoom room open for office hours purposes and use the "waiting room" feature on Zoom to admit exactly one student to the meeting at a time.

[mpara17]

@echuber2 what was the progress of implementing this feature?

[echuber2]

Sorry, I haven't been able to prioritize this yet. In the short term, I'll note that the password on the Zoom meeting could simply be removed, thus removing the hash suffix on the URL. That's because you're already posting them on queues that other people can see, so the hashed password adds no security. (You should still set your Zoom meetings to only allow Illinois-authenticated participants, though.)

[echuber2]

Hmm, on second thought, the Illinois Zoom account has enforced the passcode setting on all meetings. However, it's still possible to put the meeting room number and 6-digit passcode number (instead of the hash) in fewer than 60 chars.

I'll try to test the limit increase soon though.