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Effective today (November 19, 2025), Chat guidelines will be displayed to users upon entering a Chat room. As previously announced, Chat room owners have the option to establish room-specific guidelines.

  • A modal with general chat onboarding information, and links to the Chat FAQ and network Code of Conduct. A user will need to check the box in order to proceed. This modal will be labeled according to whatever Stack Exchange site the chat room is parented to.

  • If room-specific guidelines are established, a second modal will appear detailing those. A user will need to acknowledge the individual guidelines before being able to proceed.

  • The modals will display upon a user���s first entry into the Chat room (after today’s release). The guidelines can be accessed at any time from the Chat room’s info area. When accessed that way, only the specific room’s guidelines are displayed.

Please see the previous post for details about how the modals look and how room-specific guidelines can be set up and accessed. Please answer or comment below with questions or feedback about the new onboarding experience.

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  • thank you for the scrollbar :) it came in handy Commented Nov 20 at 2:21
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    So... was any of the feedback given in the answers to the prior post implemented? Since there hasn't been an update to the post and none are noted here, I'm assuming they were not... so I'm curious why that is (if it is the case). There was a lot of valuable commentary in answers/comments on that post so if none of the changes were made and no explanations about why are provided, I'm not quite sure why we should answer or comment with feedback when you didn't use - or even recognize - the feedback we've already given? Commented Nov 20 at 15:44
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    Ah, I see a slight change indicating generally that some of the feedback will be incorporated in the coming weeks - but you don't say which, so, again... how do we know which things we should mention to you if we have no clue which things you're already planning to implement? Commented Nov 20 at 15:51

7 Answers 7

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The bot check seems to have locked me out of all chat rooms across all networks on all devices. The dialogue does not proceed past the screencap below even after many minutes of waiting.

Not a robot?

This occurred after successfully chatting for part of the morning. I assume it is related to this broader update.

Logging out & back in did not clear the issue; however rebooting my laptop did. Presumably clearing cookies may also have worked.

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  • Same here, have not been able to get past it but I have not tried any extreme measures. Commented Nov 20 at 16:24
  • In one room, a "hard" reload let me chat again. Commented Nov 20 at 16:41
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    Yeah this was only (accidentally) alive for a few minutes. See my answer on this bug report. Commented Nov 20 at 17:15
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    Imagine the chaos if this affected Charcoal and lasted a while... Commented Nov 20 at 17:17
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Feedback: stop pelting us with modals.

The "Welcome to JavaScript" modal in the JavaScript room listing the room's rules.

What is wrong in the picture above? Maybe let us start with me being fairly familiar with chat, having only used it for years. And the JavaScript rooms is one of the first I have consistently been in for that time.

Next, I am a room owner of the JavaScript room.

And yet, I had to go through two dialogs and tick off each rule just to be able to access it.

By complete coincidence, as I was writing this post, another room owner (from a different room) was surprised by the popup. I will just quote their reaction, since it could not be more on-point:

wtf is this popup ew

They only got the first one, since their room does not have any room rules defined.

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  • Its a good way as a RO/mod to... know if the models are working Commented Nov 22 at 6:01
  • you can hide all modals with a userscript if you'd like :p Commented Nov 23 at 13:25
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I don't know if it's related to the latest release to chat or not, but for some reason when clicking on messages in mobile all the tools aren't appearing. See the below image;

![enter image description here

You can see here that the top bar shows no icons, however it should look more like this (which I got after refreshing a couple of times), with different icons for different actions:

enter image description here

This can occur on both my own messages, and others. Deleted messages, however, seem to always work; I get the link icon. Once the bug starts appearing, it is impossible for me to interact with any messages without refreshing.

The fact that this has never happened before, and I've encountered it multiple times after a release to chat, seems a little too coincidental to me.

This is occuring on Firefox 145.0.1 on Android 16. I do have userscripts enabled, however, I have disabled those and been able to replicate, so they aren't causing the issue.

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    We'll be taking a look at this, thank you for the detailed report. Commented Nov 21 at 21:00
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    Related: Message options seem to be broken on mobile chat, FireFox 144.0.2/Android 14, no userscripts enabled Commented Nov 23 at 12:47
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    This fix has been released. Commented Nov 24 at 18:57
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Similar to Snow's answer, this doesn't work on the Challenge Accepted room, and instead gives the entirely wrong information about Stack Overflow Lobby:

generic Lobby modal

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  • Previously reported on the announcement page: meta.stackexchange.com/a/414645 Commented Nov 21 at 16:37
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    seems to be resolved: i.sstatic.net/lyI2oL9F.png Commented Nov 24 at 15:45
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    @M-- I'm not so sure. I just tried it on a private browser and got a general "Welcome to the Stack Overflow Chat!" pop up. Commented Nov 24 at 21:26
  • @Sasha private as in Firefox's private and Chrome's incognito? I guess we can wait for Tom, the Sock. Commented Nov 24 at 21:29
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    @M-- yep, it was an incognito browser. I don't think that has anything to do with it though, I just opened it there because I wanted to avoid already being signed in on my staff account. I just tried it in a regular chrome browser as well (where I was signed in on my non-staff account) and it was the same. Commented Nov 24 at 21:33
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    I am following up with the folks looking into this problem, will communicate here when there are updates. Commented Nov 24 at 21:34
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    @Sasha thank you. I can guarantee that my screenshot is not a doctored one :) But your observation definitely tells us that it's not resolved (or not fully resolved) :/ Appreciate following up on this. Hopefully we can be ready to share a link to the room soon. Commented Nov 24 at 21:37
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    @M-- I never suspected malfeasance haha. Something spotty is going on for sure, because I also previously saw the correct pop-up (when I visited the room on my staff account at some point last week). Commented Nov 24 at 21:46
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    @M-- looked into it further. basically the general stack overflow chat popup comes up first (it doesn't say its the lobby anymore), and then the room specific one comes up immediately after, so its actually ok the way it is. Commented Nov 25 at 18:36
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    @Sasha yup, that's how it was for me. But I didn't clarify it (just shared the screenshot from the 2nd page of the modal). All good. Thanks for the update. p.s. maybe add status-completed here (and to Snow's answer). Commented Nov 25 at 19:11
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There is either a period or a semi-colon missing for this sentence:

Here are a few important things to know about chat on Stack Exchange before getting started

in the dialog that was shown to me the first time I visited a room on each of the three chat servers

dialog with circle indicating the missing punctuation

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    The right choice would be a colon (or a period); a semicolon isn't the right fit here. Commented Nov 20 at 16:42
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    @V2Blast English punctuation terminology is extremely confusing. In Dutch, they're called as written: a "double point" and a "point comma". In what universe is : twice as much as ; (or the other way around)? But thanks for the correction! Commented Nov 20 at 16:54
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This doesn't seem to be working for me, particularly in the SE Lobby room which has guidelines set up.

I created a new user and entered chat via the side bar and was greeted with this (note "This room has no set topic").

lobby entry text

On clicking "Let's get started", I am free to chat as a 1 rep user.

Edit: Perhaps the guidelines have been rolled back as part of this regression issue:

Can't create new chat rooms

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0

?

A user will need to acknowledge the individual guidelines before being able to proceed.

Alternatively, open dev tools and delete the modal element and start chatting like nothing happened.

This can even be automated with a userscript. Note that 14 out of the 15 lines in the userscript are generic boilerplate.

Video of me sending a message in a room where I have yet to tick the boxes in the modal. Here's the message link.

Whether this is a bug-bug, or an unavoidable limitation of the system, I don't really know. But I have to imagine it's not 100% desirable.

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    Is this keeping chatbots from being locked out, I wonder? Commented Nov 23 at 14:33
  • @DanGetz you can still post messages using the /messages/new chat url, even if you haven't accepted the modal (which, btw, is another way to bypass the guidelines) Commented Nov 23 at 23:24
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    I'd say the models are informational, rather than regulatory, and not breaking bots seems like a smart thing if it wasn't advertant Commented Nov 24 at 1:52
  • I don't mind the workarounds. These checkboxes are not binding or anything. It's for newcomers to familiarize themselves with the rules of a room; they rarely would go to the length of writing a userscript and whatnot. Having these as an option would be helpful to more established users to not get annoyed by the modals (see VLAZ's answer; not that this would be the answer to VLAZ's feedback). Commented Nov 25 at 20:41

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