Useful Zoom Settings for DRA Meetings
Dual Recovery Anonymous™ is an independent, nonprofessional, Twelve Step, self-help membership organization for people with a dual diagnosis.
Useful Zoom Settings to Help Protect Anonymity
For Zoom users: With online meetings being a useful & relatively safe way to start a new DRA meeting, many people aren’t aware of the Zoom settings that can affect your member’s anonymity.
The time it takes to set up your Zoom account to keep members safe is worth investing in, as it can help your meeting avoid affecting the spiritual foundation of our recovery – anonymity.
As you’ll be aware, online DRA meetings are accessible to a broader, often international audience, and we wanted to pass on the best practices for protecting the anonymity of your members.
These settings have been curated by Dual Recovery Anonymous World Services and are the optimal settings for protecting your meeting’s members as of February 2023.
The default Zoom settings run counter to DRA’s spiritual foundation of anonymity.
The meetings are publicly accessible, and full names and faces are often displayed. Fortunately, setting up Zoom to be safer for DRA meetings is quick and easy to do:
Suggested Meeting Setting Changes to Preserve Anonymity
Here are some suggested settings for your meeting use. Please note that most, if not all, of the settings below, are not the Zoom default:
- Log in to the Zoom.us website
- Click on the Settings link in the dashboard.
- Click on the Meeting subtab.
In your Personal Zoom Settings section, under the Meeting subtab…
Scroll through the options in In Meeting (Basic) and Meeting (Advanced) and change the following settings:
- Require Encryption for Third Party Endpoints
- Disable Auto saving chats
- Disable File transfer
- Disable Feedback to Zoom
- Disable end-of-meeting feedback survey
- Disable Screen sharing
- Disable desktop/screen share for users
- Disable Remote control
- Disable Allow Removed Participants to re-join
- Disable Virtual background (While fun, some trolls have been showing up to online meeting with violent and pornographic images as their background.)
In the Zoom Settings section, under the Recording subtab:
- Disable Local recording.
- Disable Cloud recording.
- Disable Automatic recording.
In the Zoom Settings section, under the Telephone subtab:
- Enable Mask phone number in the participant list.
Other Zoom Settings to be aware of:
- Allow users to save chats from the meeting: Set this to only be allowed by Hosts & Co-Hosts
- New meeting chat experience: We recommend you set this to on if you want DRA members to be able to format their messages and use bold fonts or emoji’s etc
- Allow participants to delete messages in meeting chat: If you switch this to off, if someone sends anything rude or unpleasant to another member, or anything else against the spirit of dual recovery, you will be able to see exactly what was sent. You might also switch this to on, so allow DRA members to delete messages they’ve sent. How you decide to set this up is up to you, but this setting has advantages & disadvantages, so it’s worth thinking about how you want your Zoom meeting to be set up.
- Enable the Screenshot feature in meeting chat: We recommend that you switch this off.
- Allow participants to react to meeting chat messages using emojis: Again, you may want to think about how you want your meeting to be set up. This allows people to react to to other’s messages using emoji’s in the Zoom chat.
- Meeting chat – Direct messages: Often meetings allow users to be able to send direct messages to each other, and again, whether you allow this depends on your meeting. This can also be enabled or disabled from the host’s security settings for each individual meeting, by clicking the security settings icon at the bottom of Zoom (on a desktop device)
- Meeting chat – Auto-save: We recommend you disable this feature.
- Sound notification when someone joins or leaves: We recommend that this feature be enabled and set up to only allow Hosts & Co-hosts to be notified when someone tries to join your meeting.
- Send files via meeting chat: We recommend that you disable this feature for security reasons.
- Co-hosts: We recommend that you enable this feature as it will allow the meeting hosts to assign the meeting participants of their choice to help them manage the Zoom meeting. Be warned that this provides the co-hosts with most of the admin features that a Host usually has, so choose who you grant access to this wisely.
- Allow participants to rename themselves: We recommend that you switch this to off and enable the next setting:
- Allow host or co-host to rename participants in the waiting room: We recommend that you enable this setting, so that if someone joins a meeting with their surname or telephone number displayed that you can rename them and remove any details that they might not want to be displayed (which is common when someone is new to DRA).
- When attendees join the meeting before the host: We recommend you have this setting disabled unless you want people to be able to join the meeting before you do.
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