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by bduerst 1570 days ago
> How do you prevent others from sharing URLs with bad actors?

Sure, but then the student who shares their interactive class URL (w/ or w/o password) on 4chan still isn't accounted for.

2 comments

Your argument boils down to "I came up with one scenario where this is bad, so it can't work at all" and I find this dissatisfying. If this hypothetical student "shared" their user account and then disavowed giving it out, you would have the same issues.
My original question is:

>How do you solve problems arising from bad actors without an object representing the user?

In response to the argument that user objects are no longer needed, even for something like virtual meetings. The scenario of zoombombing isn't something "I came up with", it's a real life scenario that having a user object helps prevent bad actors with.

In the event of a user sharing their account, you would know who it was and be able to hold the bad actor accountable, as opposed to a meeting URL being shared. I think the better question is why you are so hostile to the idea of user accounts having utility.

Jitsi lets you set room passwords, and it is also very easy to create a new Jitsi room, so you can easily send a new URL around as needed.
>Sure, but then the student who shares their interactive class URL (w/ or w/o password) on 4chan still isn't accounted for.

Emphasis added. You could create user-specific passwords, but that would require... users.

You can easily generate individual share links for every pupil and sanction the one whose link was used by a hundred random people from all over the world to join the conference. Jitsi and Big Blue Button are both able to handle this special use case where users aren't trusted to act in good faith I believe.
The individual share links would be linked to what exactly? A non-user object with the student's name and email address?
You can just make your own list. Generate 20 links, paste them somewhere, have your list of students next to it. Delete the list if nothing happened, check which number offended if it went wrong.

If you can trust the platform, in cases where the school hosts the program itself, the names can be added to the links directly. You don't need a big db of students for this, just an ephemeral list of strings.

So you're creating user records every meeting in a spreadsheet to get around having user records?
If you use email or a chat platform that has some sort of history, this rapidly reduces to sending a separate link to each person. No spreadsheet needed.

Yes, it is a pain. No, it's not more of a pain than managing user accounts for the video conference thingy. Also, the video conference thing could automate emailing/texting each participant a unique link. It could manage the invites and address books locally (e.g., via the phone's existing contact list).

If something like the windows phone social hub still existed, it could even send the links via gateways to any social network the phone was logged into. I miss that phone. So much wasted potential.