Host controls
Control who gets into your meeting and what happens inside it — approval, room lock, and recording all sit with the host.
Prerequisites: a meeting you host in Club Meet.
What the host controls
A host has authority over the room that a participant does not. The controls fall into two groups: who gets in, and what happens once they are in.
Controlling who gets in
Require approval
Turn on Require Approval and guests do not enter directly — they land in a waiting state and request to join. You see each pending request as it arrives and admit people one at a time, so no one reaches the room until you let them.
A signed-in member you expect can be admitted in a tap; an unrecognized name is a prompt to check before you open the door.
Lock the room
Locking a meeting closes it to new entrants. Once a room is locked, people who are not already in — and are not the host — cannot join, even with a valid link. Use it to seal a conversation once everyone expected has arrived.
Approval and lock do different jobs
Approval screens people as they arrive; a lock shuts the door entirely. Use approval when you are still expecting people, and lock once the room is complete.
Controlling what happens inside
- Recording. Recording is host-only. Participants cannot start or stop it; only the host decides whether a meeting is recorded, and recording stays consent-gated. See Recordings and transcripts.
- The participant list. The host sees who is in the room and manages the roster from the participants view.
- Notetaker. The host decides whether a notetaker captures the meeting, including for calls that run on external platforms. See External recordings.
Hosting an instant meeting
Instant Quick Meetings are approval-free by design: anyone with the link joins directly, without waiting to be admitted. That is the point of an instant meeting — speed over gatekeeping. If you need approval or a lock for a conversation, run it as a scheduled meeting rather than a Quick Meeting. See Instant meetings.