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Catija
Catija
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Creating good UI guidance is really difficult and that's why there are limits in place for most "official" guidance limiting who creates it. Most requires staff to create or update with only a small amount granted to moderators, often with a two mod handshake required to enact the change.

But ROs in chat aren't "special" the way CMs and Mods are. It's not a role of trust - it's literally just whoever created the room or the system opting to award the role to the most active user in a room that didn't already have an RO. That doesn't indicate someone who should be trusted to create official-looking UI on this platform.

I own many rooms but I'm not sure that any of the ones I've created for personal use would benefit from this feature and I certainly don't like having so many extra fields making the room creation process seem more difficult. Can you please share your reasoning for these decisions and maybe reconsider some of them?

Also, many messages in chat are created by bots - so saying Chat is with real humans isn't even true.

I own many rooms but I'm not sure that any of the ones I've created for personal use would benefit from this feature and I certainly don't like having so many extra fields making the room creation process seem more difficult. Can you please share your reasoning for these decisions and maybe reconsider some of them?

Creating good UI guidance is really difficult and that's why there are limits in place for most "official" guidance limiting who creates it. Most requires staff to create or update with only a small amount granted to moderators, often with a two mod handshake required to enact the change.

But ROs in chat aren't "special" the way CMs and Mods are. It's not a role of trust - it's literally just whoever created the room or the system opting to award the role to the most active user in a room that didn't already have an RO. That doesn't indicate someone who should be trusted to create official-looking UI on this platform.

I own many rooms but I'm not sure that any of the ones I've created for personal use would benefit from this feature and I certainly don't like having so many extra fields making the room creation process seem more difficult. Can you please share your reasoning for these decisions and maybe reconsider some of them?

Also, many messages in chat are created by bots - so saying Chat is with real humans isn't even true.

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Catija
Catija
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I think this will be a valuable feature for rooms that have established expectations and guidelines and could be a cool thing to build into the mod election room creation tooling to replace the default chat messages CMs post in the room, which are quickly lost as conversation happens.

I also see it having value for warning users visiting some rooms for the first time where the content may need some context - whether that's because it may not be universally "safe" (but we continue to allow it) or the room is serving as a historical reference, as for post comments moved to chat.

That said, I have concerns about its inclusion as an option for all room types and whether there's enough oversight to ensure it's used appropriately. In particular, I'm not sure I understand why this would be part of the room creation process - and which room creation workflows would include this. This feels like something that could be a nuisance/abused but I'm curious whether y'all have any thoughts about these points.

  • Are users prompted to review these whenever they are created or updated?
    • You say that users will see it the first time they enter a room but what if they've been visiting the room for years already?
    • To ensure oversight and support continued knowledge/acceptance of a room's guidelines, will edits to the guidelines require all users to review and accept them again?
      • If so, should a "minor edit" option exist for changes with only a handful of characters difference?
      • If not, how do you plan to ensure oversight to prevent the text being overhauled without other ROs or regulars in the room being made aware of it?
  • Is this supported in rooms generally considered to be short-term or temporary, such as those created through the "start room with this user" or "continue comments in chat" process and other non-general use rooms? Why?
    • If so, will those processes also be revamped to add all of these fields to fill out?
  • Can this be a separate step from the room creation UI instead of being added to it?
    • I can't honestly imagine a user creating a brand new room and being faced with that huge UI with six new fields doubling the room creation overhead.
    • A newly-created room is unlikely to have guidelines to enumerate, making the mental load when creating a room even more weighty.
    • The current UI doesn't make it clear the fields are optional. Having fields presented as part of the room creation process seems like it'd be tempting people to put random crap in the fields... or, at best, just "none" six times over.

The thing is, most rooms don't need a feature like this but it seems that it's not only enabled by default for any RO who wants it, y'all are actively pushing people to use it even when it's highly unlikely they'll have any clue what to put in these fields.

I own many rooms but I'm not sure that any of the ones I've created for personal use would benefit from this feature and I certainly don't like having so many extra fields making the room creation process seem more difficult. Can you please share your reasoning for these decisions and maybe reconsider some of them?