Hi Fritz!
Wanted to chime in here and say that I like your solution of having the "two lock" system - one in which the host can mutes/unmute participants, and another where a user mutes themselves and only they can un-mute. This rather elegantly helps address the privacy concern about WebEx hosts unmuting someone who has decided they want to stay private - and I would agree, if someone understands how to mute, then they will also know how to un-mute.
I also wanted to add to the chorus here of people who have found this sudden change to be challenging - and perhaps address why people aren't "not smart enough" to figure out how to unmute. I work in a large, rural hospital system - many of our endusers are physicians, medical staff, etc. I.e., generally highly educated people who are plenty smart. COVID has forced all of us to adapt our processes on the fly - which, of course, means a sudden adoption of televideo as a mode for meetings, patient visits, tumor conferences, etc.
What this means is that a lot of people who may have used this technology once or twice in the past year are all of a sudden using it all the time. The massive influx of people using the tech and a severe lack of staffing throughout means that there wasn't really time to train people appropriately. Furthermore, there have been tweaks to WebEx over the past few months, including a change in visual formatting (e.g., they added the small microphone icon on the right panel instead of a speaker icon, the way that icons is displayed has been adjusted, etc.). It's sometimes hard to teach people when the format of things shift - even very smart folks like physicians!
In the real world, like Tom says, most hosts end up muting everyone on join because the amount of people who don't mute (or don't know how to mute) is extremely high. People are calling in from their cars, from their homes w/ kids - and those who make the most noise are usually unaware they are the culprit. Muting all is much easier. Furthermore, even though people attend many, many meetings this way, they don't always talk - and up to this point, moderators often did the muting/unmuting.
So, you now have 100's of endusers who have never actually pressed the mute button/don't have any idea where it is. Some people mute their office phones but don't use the mute button in WebEx. Sometimes they get muted by the mod and mute their phones and thus get double muted and can't figure it out why no one can hear them talk. In a real world scenario, there isn't time to have someone figure this out - mostly there are calls for people to unmute and if they don't figure it out, then the meeting moves on. And most people just chalk it up to "problems with the WebEx again" and don't circle back to really understand why.
What this boils down to is: a change like this has a large scale effect on a process that most people in the real world rely on to avoid the chaos that ensues from having 50+ people on a call of which only 1/2 may actually know that a mute function exists and only 1/4 actually use it. While there are things that can be done to address is (e.g., providing a quick training/tip document to end users on the change and reminding them at EVERY MEETING that they have to manually unmute themselves) this sort of thing takes time to percolate and it becomes a huge problem when it's dropped without warning and people only find out about it when they try to do what has worked 100/100 time previously and now does not.
Again, I favor Fritz's solution above because it's elegant, but also would hope that the plan for Cisco to roll back/modify this is emergent - think it's totally workable, just need to make sure information about the change is cascaded appropriately so people aren't caught off guard (it would be better to have people prepared and then turn on, then turn on and have people scramble to figure out why things are suddenly different).
Also, for the record, Cisco's own training page even still indicates that hosts can mute/unmute participants so this is clearly a new "feature" (contrary to the first response): https://help.webex.com/en-us/n94aj5j/Mute-or-Unmute-in-Webex-Meetings-Suite
My 2 cents
=m=
