Solution to Zoom’s Login Quirk: A COVID-19 Response

By Satoru Shinagawa

[Note: On 16 March 2020, Satoru embedded an instructional video in a University of Hawaii email list on how to work around a log-in quirk in Zoom. Since the video includes private account numbers, we’re omitting it from this article. Later that day, Helen responded with instructions on adjusting the default settings to avoid this quirk. -Editor]

Unless you are familiar to some extent with the online conference software Zoom, this video [this video has been omitted for security reasons – editor] may not make sense. If that’s the case, please disregard this e-mail. Or if you find what I’m talking about confusing, please don’t pay any attention to this e-mail to avoid further confusion.

Now, unless you log in to your Zoom in a certain way, you won’t get to the meeting room assigned to your permanent Zoom ID. In the attached three-minute video, I did my best to explain how to log in to your permanent Zoom ID meeting room. To the best of my knowledge, this is how you log in. If I’m incorrect, please accept my apologies and delete this e-mail.


By Helen Torigoe

Hi, Satoru.

Thank you so much for sharing your solution to the annoying “default feature” of Zoom! That is a good workaround. 

There is also a setting in your Zoom account that you can change to ensure that all of your scheduled and instant meetings will default to your permanent meeting ID assigned by Zoom.

1. Log in to Zoom.

2. Go to Settings in the left-hand menu:

3. Scroll down the screen a bit and turn on the two items: “Use Personal Meeting ID (PMI) when scheduling a meeting” and “Use Personal Meeting ID (PMI) when starting an instant meeting.”

This should solve the log-in problem. Good luck with your online/remote teaching!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: