Navigating and managing locked rooms as the room owner or host is very similar to navigating and managing rooms that are unlocked. However, with locked rooms, you will be in control of who gets to enter and who doesn't.
How to Tell When Someone's Asking to Join
If the Session room's privacy is set to 'Locked', participants must ask to join and wait to be let into the room. When someone asks to join your room, you'll receive a notification within Session if you are inside the room's lobby, or if you are inside the room itself. This is how it will look:
Letting Participants Into the Room
If you would like the participant who's asking to join to enter the room, simply click on Allow. As mentioned before, you can allow them to enter if you haven't joined yet and you're in the room's lobby
Requests to join will still show up even if the participant navigated away from the Session website after asking to join. If you would like them to be able to join if they return, selecting Allow will ensure that they can enter the Session when they come back.
What Happens If I Deny Someone Entry to the Room?
When you deny someone access to the room by selecting Deny on the notification, they will see a message advising them that they have been denied access to the room. They will also see that they can wait to ask to join again if they'd like to.
Please note that participants can reload the page in order to ask to join again.
Using Browser Notifications To Manage Locked Rooms
You can enable browser notifications which allow browser notifications to be sent when someone asks to join one of your locked rooms. The good thing about browser notifications is that you don't need to be within the room's lobby, inside the room, or even have the Session opened in order to be notified.
To enable browser notifications
- Log into your Session account
- Click on your avatar at the top right of the screen
- Select Settings
Receiving Browser Notifications
When someone asks to join, you will get a notification that looks like this for Google Chrome:
For Firefox:
You will be advised of the name of the participant as well as the name of the room that they are trying to join. Clicking on the notification will take you to the lobby for the room where you can select Allow or Deny to let them in or not as explained above.
You will receive browser notifications for all the web browsers that you have browser notifications enabled for. They will also come through even if you are logged out of your Session account in a particular browser. If you primarily use a certain browser, we recommend turning off browser notifications for the others.
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