If you’re still using Zoom to hold your meetings, there’s a new feature that might be of interest to you if you want to playfully disrupt your team with a little ‘Rickroll’. However, the feature strangely has office hours, and you won’t be able to use Rick if he’s clocked out.
Like in the video above, just copy your Zoom meeting’s link and paste it to this website. However, it isn’t going to be automatic. You’ll have to join in a queue, where you’ll also get an estimated time until Rick joins the meeting—so here’s hoping the meeting goes on for a bit if Rick’s busy.
When it’s time, you would have successfully Rickroll’d your team mates. What would happen is that “Rick Astley” would pop up like another Zoom guest and his hit 80s song “Never Gonna Give You Up” will play for everyone in the meeting. The Rickroll only lasts for 15 seconds before it disconnects.
I tried to use the feature myself, but when I did I was met with a notification telling me that “Rick is currently sleeping”, and that “his hours are weekdays 10AM-4PM EST”. This meant that he would only be available at 10PM – 4AM Malaysian time—a weird time for a professional meeting to be held.
Why does Rick have a sleep schedule?
The feature’s creator Matt Reed revealed that he sacrificed his personal Zoom account. He used his own account by changing his Zoom profile to Rick and setting up a ManyCam Virtual Camera with a looping clip of “Never Gonna Give You Up” as the media source.
“I just switch my Zoom camera to ManyCam so any meeting I join immediately gets Rickrolled to infinity by the man himself,” he wrote.
After you paste the link onto inviterick.com, it saves to a local database that Reed would be monitoring and Rick will start rolling to an invited meeting. Once rolling has been completed for 15 seconds, he moves on to the next link he’s been invited to.
Is it safe?
It’s a risk to give out a link to a Zoom meeting to an outsider, especially if you guys will be talking about important and private stuff. Especially now when you find out that it’s an actual person behind the Rick Astley mask being invited to all these meetings, it might only be a good idea for you to do this if you’re just in a casual meet up on Zoom rather than a work meeting.
Reed also shares that his Rickroll feature might not last too long, as it potentially violates Zoom’s terms of service—“You agree that you will not use, and will not permit any end user to use the Services to (iv) transmit through the Services any material that may infringe the intellectual property or other rights of third parties.”
“Once the gig is up I’m guessing that it is bye-bye Rick time. If that day ever comes we will have let you down but remember, Rick is never gonna give you up,” wrote Reed.
Zoom, after several privacy and security issues, has been trying to improve on their kinks. In early June, Zoom planned to strengthen encryption of video calls but it will only benefit paying clients and leaves out users of the free tier.
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