Google Meet is making it easier to deal with unruly call participants

You can make people leave and don't come back again

If you've ever been in a public Google Meet call, you probably know that it's not a strange occurrence to see people randomly crashing into calls to troll other attendants and disturb them. Call crashers have been an issue for almost as long as online meetings over Zoom and Google Meet have been in our lives — so two years for most people — and developers behind videoconferencing apps keep coming up with ways to properly deal with them. This latest one from Google Meet might prove effective to keep them at bay completely, perhaps for good.

The service was already offering the option to boot people out of a call. But as announced by the company in a blog post, kicking people out now prompts you with further options to straight out block them from ever joining the call again. This joins the existing option to report someone for abuse.

Image source: Google Workspace Blog

Previously, block-like functionality existed that was built into the service's "knocking" feature. When a participant gets rejected twice from joining, they won't be able to knock to enter again for the remainder of the meeting. This is just taking things a step further by adding an option to vanish a user completely. Google recommends only using the "block" functionality when it's absolutely necessary, but we're well aware that it's "absolutely necessary" more often than it's not. These additional options can go a long way to deal with disruptions in your calls and keep blocked people from being able to join the call again — and also hold them accountable by throwing in a report for good measure.

The new feature should be gradually rolled out to Google Meet users within the next 15 days. On desktop, there's nothing you need to do, while on Android and iOS phones, you might need an app update before getting the new prompt, so if you don't have it, make sure your app is fully updated on Google Play.