Effective today, January 29, 2026, all users on Stack Exchange can now participate in public chat rooms, regardless of reputation. Formerly, users with less than 20 reputation were only able to access the Stack Exchange Lobby, via the Chat links on the left sidebar and in the top right menu. Now those navigation links lead to the site’s chat landing page, just as they do for users with more than 20 reputation.
We spent much of 2025 working to update the chat experience on the network, implementing many improvements requested by the community over the years. Some changes were focused on design and user experience, while others were more “under the hood” and focused on stability and sustainability.
We’re aiming for community growth as a return on that investment. This is not about adding characters and junk content to increase contribution metrics. We want deeper human interaction in the increasingly AI-saturated world, more collaboration and problem solving, and new and more diverse voices. We feel confident that this is a shared goal with the existing community. Indeed, many of you have spoken about how you took your first steps on Stack Exchange by participating in chat.
Less-structured and real-time conversational spaces are where bonds can be forged and communities can be built. In this time of slower Q&A activity and more places for quick answers, earning 20 rep in order to enter chat is a taller order – so we’re seeing how it goes if we remove that barrier.
We made this change on Stack Overflow earlier in January.
What we’ve seen on Stack Overflow since then:
Reduced activity in the Lobby chat room
New chat users sending “hello” messages and similar greetings
New chat users asking on-topic general & beginner types of questions
Unclear messages and “code dumps” from new chat users that result in either follow-up questions or message removal
Overall, a modest increase in activity from users with less than 20 reputation
In general, we expect to see the same happening on Stack Exchange: new chat users exploring what’s available and taking their first steps.
What we have not seen on Stack Overflow:
Large numbers of chaotic messages and nonsensical posts
A surge in spam posts and activity by bad actors
A large increase in message deletions (or forms of soft deletion)
The lack of large-scale problems helped us determine that this is a safe enough change to make on Stack Exchange as well. We do hope to see a bigger increase in participation, which may happen gradually over time. We’re monitoring activity, and Community Managers are using new tooling to review messages from lower-rep users for problematic content.
If problems emerge, we’ll assess them case by case. And if persistent issues prove difficult to overcome, the reputation requirement can always be changed again. Let’s see how this experience rolls out and affects the environment of chat.
As noted in this recent post, the Community Management team will be working more closely and consistently with individual communities in the coming year. As CMs introduce themselves and kick off conversations about community development, chat may be a topic of discussion.
FAQ
What can room owners do to manage increased activity in chat rooms?
Room owners and moderators can set up room guidelines using the new functionality. Some users will read them, and others won’t, but having guidelines established shows that there are expectations and something to justify revoking room privileges if a user does not follow them. Additionally, consider updating a chat room’s description to clearly state what the room is about and the type of conversation that’s expected there. This up-front clarity can help protect the culture that the community has already established for that space.
Room owners now have the option to ban specific users from a chat room for a set amount of time, up to 7 days. The kick-mute option is fully configurable now in that way. Users kicked from a room have that action noted on their chat profile, visible to site moderators who may be assessing user behavior across multiple rooms.
The Gallery configuration remains an option for room owners who wish to restrict access.
Why can’t individual sites decide on this?
Unlike some other privileges, we can only make this reputation threshold change at the chat database level; we can’t change this at the per-site level. Since most Stack Exchange network sites share a chat database, this change will be applied to the entire SE chat database (or “chat server” to use the more common term).
Will the Meta Stack Exchange chat database also have a lower reputation requirement?
No. But if there is interest in doing that, it’s an option.
Let us know about what opportunities you see with this change, what concerns you have, and how things are going.
For Stack Overflow, we established a Chat Room Owner Lounge specifically for room owners, aspiring room owners, site moderators, and staff to discuss chat room management. Should we establish a similar space for Stack Exchange chat?
If usage of the Stack Exchange Lobby declines, should we make efforts to keep the room active?
