Hello, we are thrilled to hear of all the online bookish delights that are currently happening but sad to hear that trolls are still crashing them. We have experience in this... if you need any help/advice in troll slaying for your Zoom sesh, just DM x

4 quick tips for a troll-free Zoom event-
1. Set up a waiting room. More on this later.
2. make screen share ‘host only’. Trolls like to splay porn all over the screens of your unsuspecting audience. If you have a guest who needs to screen share, make them a co-host

3. If you don’t mute your audience, trolls can and will shout racist slurs.
4. Monitor your chat box. If you’ve implemented 1-3, well done, but trolls will still use the chat box to post pornographic and racist comments. This one is hard to avoid - you need the chat box - but

(a) it is less disruptive than porn splashed across your screen via screen share or racist shouts, and (b) if you’ve got your waiting room set up you can place the trolls back in there & then remove them altogether

Lastly, disable your participants ability to rename themselves

As trolls will use this to shift around. They tend to zoom-bomb in packs. I’m hoping @Zoom will step-up their host controls to make zoom-bombing a distant memory, but right now it is prevalent and very distressing for participants.

BUT if you follow the steps above you’ll minimise the disruption