The different chat servers cause confusion. There are three different chat servers, but many more sites. This is just a historical artifact in the end and adds barriers for no reason (though with the limited chat moderation and customs just tearing down the barrier would likely be problematic as well).

Chat moderation tools and concepts are simply not very good. And some decision here fan the flames when some drama occurs rather than de-escalate. The biggest issue here are 10k-visible spam/offensive flags (see my old MSE post here). There's plenty of complaints on these parts here on MSE, but you'll have to look pretty far back into the past to find the real discussions on those problems.

There are very different views on how to handle chat and responsibility for moderating it is very diffuse. This leads to very inconsistent moderation as it depends entirely on the mod that chooses to act.

Chat doesn't share the top bar with the main sites, would be nice to be able to see live notification counts also there. In general chat behaves differently and its age is noticeable as the main sites have evolved and chat stayed the same.

Chat is barely visible from the main sites, and it can be very confusing to choose the right chat room.

The single greatest use of chat I know of (and I have highlighted it many times to SO management) is the PHP chat room. Why is it so important? It's heavily populated with people who write the PHP language itself (as opposed to people like myself, who have merely written in the language). I started hanging out in there and saw some of PHP history made (most notably a highly debated and extremely contentious issue, which is still probably the most voted RFC in PHP history). That issue was discussed and coordinated in the PHP room.

I have since moved on to other chat endeavors.

Chat is a decent product as-is. But, as some have noted, it really gets neglected. Some various issues, in no particular order

Chat needs an API

Some folks have "API-tized" chat on their own to run various bots in chat (like this one), but a proper API would let chat bots run more readily, without having to reverse engineer an API.

Room Owners are a neglected moderation tier

Seven years ago, we had an incident in SO chat. The TL;DR of that was there was a discussion that moved onto a topic probably best left out of Chat, a new user took offense and tried to force a topic change, and flags were raised as a result. My (somewhat rambling answer) still stands: it wasn't a topic for chat, but the only option for non-moderators was to raise a flag that results in a 30-minute chat ban if validated. Only diamond moderators have the tooling to deal with situations like that in any fashion that does not require a chat suspension to solve.

That prompted me to post this

There's three things I'd like to see added here if we're going to add more accountability

1. Give us the same options for chat that comments have. Right now we have one giant flag for everything, and if you sustain that flag, the message is deleted and the user is banned for 30 mins per flag. Sometimes things just need deletion without a ban. We fixed this for comments, let's fix it here
2. Allow Room Owners to delete chat in their rooms. If we want internal policing, that must come with expanded powers for people we're going to hold to the fire. Internal policing can and should be the first line of defense here. If a RO sees things going off the rails, all they can do is temporarily kick people. Deleting messages would add more teeth and moderators can still see the deleted messages
3. Allow Room Owners to issue room bans for up to 60 mins. Can't behave? You can be thrown out without a moderator needing to do anything.

A Room Owner should be able to step in and moderate their own room. They kinda can, but kick-mute is limited, room timeouts affect all users, and Room Owners cannot delete messages (they can move them out of the room, which is not quite the same thing).

Flag history for moderators

Shog9 apparently whipped up a bare-bones "Last X posts flagged" page, but

1. You have to know the URL (/admin/recent-flags on all chat servers). It's not linked anywhere in chat tooling
2. The page has zero formatting. It's stuck in amber, quietly serving up HTML 4.0 tables like they're going out of style. CSS? Dang kids, get off my lawn!
3. The page shows you who posted the flagged comment

Things not shown

1. Who flagged the comment. Visible to moderators, but only while the flag is active (i.e. you clicked the flag bubble in chat itself)
2. There's no flag history for users. Mods can see post and comment flags raised by a user. This should be the same for chat.

Make the moderator handing of chat flags similar to posts

The flag handling interface is clunky.

When a mod flag is raised like this, you can delete the chat post. Confusingly, this does not handle the flag like it does with posts or comments. The UI doesn't help you out here

Post flags can be helpful, disputed or declined. Comment flags can be helpful or declined. Chat flags are merely handled ("dismissed") or unhandled. And "dismiss" doesn't really explain any of that. Worse, users can either get nothing (probably 99% of chat flags), or they can get the "noise" banner. I have no idea if the chat user gets this if they're not in chat at the moment of the chat dismissal.

I'd like to see the UI make thing clearer with actual buttons

• Helpful - Close the flag
• Delete - Remove the chat entry and close the flag
• Decline - Send a "noisy" notice to the user (hopefully this shows up when they pop into chat the next time)

This brings chat moderation tooling into line with the post and comment moderation tooling.

Use Cases

I don't honestly remember how I first discovered it. I feel like chat used to be in the top bar... so it was significantly easier to find. I remember stumbling into Shadow's Den here on MSE because it was the most recently active room and I was looking for help and being confused at them playing Word Association Games - but they were helpful... I think.

Mostly, Chat was where I got to know people between answering or curating posts. I was active in the main rooms on all of the sites I used regularly - Movies & TV, ELL, Cooking - and it's where I made some great friends. I've even met some of them in person.

While a lot of Chat was just talking, there was also a lot of policy planning and informal discussion about the best practices for the sites. Some rooms were discovered by people struggling to ask a question but most of the rooms seemed to be people who were regulars and wanted to have a common room to build community.

Most of the rooms would have feeds letting the users know when new questions were asked on the Main or Meta site, helping me know if there was stuff that I might be able to address - this was particularly helpful for Meta, which can otherwise be easy to forget about for many people.

At some point, I spent more time in Chat than posting on the sites. I remember back in 2018 Shog did a query and I had been the most pinged person in Chat over the last year. I was in over a dozen rooms at any given time and would pop around chatting with anyone who happened to be around - and there usually were many people around to chat with, so I'd be having multiple conversations going at once.

When I was hired as a CM, my Chat usage changed quite a bit - mostly due to where I was chatting rather than how much - I was in a lot more Moderator rooms and a lot fewer public ones. I spent a lot of my time at SO advocating for Chat and educating people about it. See if someone can dig up the Introduction to Chat presentation I created. Heck, I'll give the presentation for you if you send me the slides - there is a quiz in the middle but you don't have to get a passing score to get credit for the course.

The thing that amazes me about Chat is what people use it for. I've spent hours flagging spam that Charcoal identifies, used other scripts to find problematic comments on IPS that needed to be deleted, watched the SOCVR people identify and close questions on SO that had issues. It's incredible to know how much people have managed to do with such a simple tool.

That simplicity is a feature, by the way. While some people may complain about not having reactions or other things you see in more modern chat tools, Chat is actually pretty fully-featured and really nicely designed without being overly complicated.

Pain Points

Moderation

Hopefully y'all are already aware that Chat moderation is flawed. At this point, there's not usually a reason to let every 10k user in Chat know about a flag in another room, which often draws a ton of eyes to something that may not be a big issue. This also tends to lead to a lot of finger pointing - "Who dared to flag my message!" and can negatively impact the relationships in a Chat space.

Chat moderation can be pretty spotty, particularly because there's little/no oversight. If the users who frequent a room don't care about things being said that might go against the CoC, then no one's likely to moderate that content unless someone randomly shows up in the room and starts flagging. While that's not something I generally feel too much concern about, if y'all start putting effort into increasing the usage of Chat, I'd encourage y'all put some thought into it.

Keep in mind that the Rooms page sorts by room type first (General, "Discussion between...", "Room for..."), even when sorted by "active", which actually causes some highly-active rooms to be hidden on later pages due to how they were created, even though they have thousands of messages.

Think about who's actually moderating Chat. I don't think "all 10k users" is a great option. It's easy but not great. Lots of users with less than 10k rep are capable of moderating chat - let them! Right now, there's Site Moderators and Room Owners but there's room for more, whether that's having a way to grant Chat moderation tools to non-site moderators to all of Chat or expanding Room Owner privileges to be more akin to a Room Moderator - or both.

Be thoughtful about private rooms - who can create them and who can use them. It's currently impossible to know what's going on in private rooms without visiting each one individually - that's not good. The only thing that makes it low-risk is that they have to be created by a mod. Having an all-room feed for private rooms that CMs have access to would be extremely helpful.

But if you're going to increase usership, you have to get even more basic than that - Chat moderation UI is terrible.

• Chat mods can only see the name/s of who flagged something if the flag is in in a room parented to a site they moderate.
• Once the flags are handled, the only way to see who raised flags is for staff to check the Chat SEDE.
• There's no flag history for users.
• The flag history is per server rather than per room or site and the UI is difficult to comprehend.
• Flag handling UI is confusing and doesn't explain the outcome to reviewers and there's no way to opt out once you hit the Rep requirement.

Chat access

Being able to use Chat requires minimal participation but it does require some reputation - which can be difficult to earn. The barrier exists for a reason and has done an amazing job of keeping spam and other abuse out of Chat. Unfortunately, it makes Chat inaccessible to low-rep users without a mod to give them write permission to a room. Finding a solution to this issue may take some creative thinking but I believe it's important if you want to avoid spam and other problematic behaviors in Chat. Maybe it means having a special class of Chat room that's only accessible to low rep users but gives an avenue to full chat access without reputation requirements

Search

OMG Chat search is terribad. I don't even know how to explain it. You have to search for specific words or a precise phrase - there's no fuzzy search at all. Searching by username is really challenging when you're searching for a user who has the same name as dozens of other people - there's no way to know which user is which. Search only returns so many results, so searching for common words makes it difficult to find anything but you're limited in many ways.

Other asks

• Like the "main chat" which doesn't freeze even if there's no recent activity, identify the site's moderator chat rooms and prevent them from freezing - or have a way staff or mods can designate a room that shouldn't freeze automatically.
• Create a way to prevent specific users from accessing/using specific rooms rather than relying on a chat suspension.
• Rethink the whole process for how a user's Chat profile is tied to a specific parent site, which determines whether they get suspended in chat or not if they get suspended on a site.
• Have an official target for problematic comments that are moved by mods/ROs. Don't notify users when messages are moved there.
• Let mods see inline deleted chat messages without a userscript.
• Fix the message history purge tool so it doesn't require an edit to work.
• Allow mods to undelete Chat messages.

There's probably other stuff but this was the things that came to mind.

You wanted experiences, and not necessarily concrete action items, so I'll just drop some random thoughts.

I currently use chat a lot on my phone (mainly chatting about Meta or checking in on what the Arqade people are talking about), and man is the mobile experience in dire need of love. A lot of functionality is missing, some of the buttons are tiny, and it's got a fair few oddball bugs, too. If chat becomes more popular I can guarantee you that folks are going to want a mobile experience that's up to today's standards. I'd be happy to list the issues I experience on mobile if you want specifics.

I like chat. It works surprisingly well given its age. I love how the transcript flows, even if it's a bit obscure to new users (it's hard to learn how to reply to messages or learn how that's denoted in the transcript with a little arrow that takes you to the replied-to message). I like that other users can take part in moderation via flagging down inappropriate messages, even if that system's showing its age. It's a surprisingly solid platform, and if it looked pretty, I think you've got the bones of something great. The bookmarks feature can encapsulate conversations in a way that even Discord can't, saving important discussions forever.

Generally, I use chat for collaboration a lot. It can be a good supplement to the site for my needs because I'm a pretty active contributor, but I'd expect that use-case doesn't scale past highly-active users. A lot of conversations eventually result in main site action on Meta or on SO, and is facilitated far better there than in a meta question. Arqade's chatrooms are the only other place to my knowledge where folks talk just to talk, and you might be able to add the Math and Politics chatrooms to that, but I think those are a bit of an outlier. Yeah, folks in chat do shoot the breeze from time to time, but people don't really come to Stack Exchange's chat system to talk about what they had for dinner last night... Typically. I think there are a bunch of other social media platforms that do that far better (*cough* Discord), and I'd caution against attempting to compete with their supremacy.

For pain points, I'll skip over visibility (chat is very undiscoverable), and I'll leave aside my "more mod tools" comments for someone with more experience. I think that the comments-moved-to-chat experience just kills the conversation most of the time. I very rarely move comments to chat here on Meta, partially because that's established practice, and partially because chat just kills the convo. On Meta I just delete the comments that aren't needed anymore and leave the rest, for better or worse. I can almost certainly guarantee you that folks who see that comments were moved to chat will not click the link that takes them to the related chatroom to see what else was discussed. I have to imagine this isn't a unique experience, but I could be completely out of touch here. Someone let me know.

Summarizing that above feedback, if I'm talking about an answer... I'd like to continue talking about that answer beneath that answer in the comments. I know, that's not always what comments are for, but that's what feels right to me. If I can muse, comment threading could be a good thing here (and its own can of worms, of course), but I'd like to open our minds to the possibility that taking an existing discussion away from the comments and into chat might be something we want to walk away from.

I'd also generally say something that surprised me about SE's chat system is that Room Owners don't really feel like Room Owners. Sure, they can edit the room, pin messages, and they can kick people (which has its own problems as Kevin explains), but they don't really "own" the room in the sense that I was hoping they could. The capabilities they have to actually manage problem users is limited. I really don't see a problem with Room Owners being able to just ban someone, permanently or otherwise, from their room if they're consistently running afoul of what a Room Owner's trying to enforce. I think they shouldn't have to get moderators involved when it's a localized problem. It's their room after all. They're an owner, aren't they? Let them do the "ask, tell, make" dance instead of mods.

If more users were to come to chat, I think they're welcome to participate in the discussions currently ongoing within the rooms that already exist. Let them chat in existing rooms and if they can do that well, maybe let them make their own, and give them the ability for them to make it work how they want. Reputation currently stands as a gateway to allowing their participation, and if "just anyone" were able to drop into chat and start posting, we'd quickly have problems, so if that changed... We'd need to think that through very carefully.

TL;DR: I'd like to see you guys make it pretty, make it responsive, make it functional, give us a few bells and whistles... Then make it popular.

TL;DR of the TL;DR: Give balpha a couple engineers and some whiskey, then handcuff him to his desk for 30 days. What emerges might be great. Or you'll just get a lawsuit. Who knows?

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

I'mma be honest - I have no idea. It was over ten years ago and I do not remember. I think chat has become less discoverable in that time, but I don't remember the exact path I took to first hop into chat and get involved. I do remember that early on, I had some... mixed experiences in Mos Eisley - the main chatroom for Science Fiction & Fantasy at the time, which has been permanently shut down since 2017 - but that at the same time I had positive experiences with mods and CMs in that same room, and got involved with some site cleanup efforts (such as around tags). If I hadn't had those positive experiences, I'm not sure I would have stuck around in chat or on the network in general.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

The Teachers' Lounge

For one thing, I just finished a two-and-a-half-year term as a Teachers' Lounge Room Moderator. Within that context, I was helping to keep the TL (the network-wide moderator chatroom) in order; I've written a little more on what that means on the Moderator Team.

Aside from moderating it, the TL has been one of my favorate spaces on the internet since I first gained access in 2017 - the crowd, although admittedly smaller than it used to be, is made up of intelligent, articulate, and moral individuals, working together to uphold the ideals of the network. That manifests itself in different ways, from coordinating moderator actions to running experiments to giving advice to other mods. Not everyone always agrees on everything, but I can almost always depend on the discussion to be reasonable, including hot-button topics.

Moderation bots

I've been involved in a long list of chatbots that help with moderation over the years, the most notable of which is SmokeDetector, although others include comment moderation bots, the host of bots run by SOBotics, and more secret moderation bots that I shan't elaborate on here. ;)

The Community Team is, I believe, fairly aware of Smokey and how it works, since today it's pretty much the primary line of defense against spam on the network. There's some level of coordination between staff and Charcoal these days, and so I don't think I need to get too deeply into how that works or its significance here.

The comment moderation bots in particular were designed to fill a gap in the comment moderation tools, such as creating a searchable historical record of comments and quickly spotting devolving conversations.

While my personal involvement with these bots has dropped recently, they've played significant roles in my time on the network and knowing I can count on them to fill critical gaps in tooling or simply to supplement is reassuring; they're quite important in the chat ecosystem.

Let's roll the dice

I also am part of a group that plays role-playing games on chat (you can read the transcripts of our sessions). This has been running for a number of years at this point; currently, we're playing the horror game Call of Cthulhu with myself as the Keeper (Game Master). Since it's a horror game, we also have a bot running, developed by someone kidnapped into our group in order to create it, that allows any of the players at any time to anonymously press a button that will stop the game, for use in cases when a boundary accidentally gets crossed or the imagery crosses a line. (We have never had to use this button, but it's good to have just in case and is a recommended element when playing horror RPGs).

We run the games on SE chat since, first and foremost, we're all SE users and know each other from other rooms (primary The Sphinx's Lair, the main Puzzling.SE room). There are also a few other features that make SE chat a good choice, such as the bookmark feature and being able to search the chat transcript, which make it much easier to keep track of what's happened in the game. We do have a Discord server also, where we share memes and have side discussions, but SE chat remains where the game takes place.

Other rooms

I also lurk in a number of other rooms, primarily the main rooms for certain SE sites, including the Tavern here on our very own Meta. I do have to say that participating in many of these rooms plummeted in 2019-2020 and never recovered, for various reasons. In any case, the current usage of these main rooms is often discussing aspects of the site, such as tags and edits, and a few rooms - such as the Literature.SE room and the Puzzling.SE room - are still more-or-less able to maintain general discussion related to the topic of the site. I know there are rooms that are more active, that I personally am not involved in (such as the Math.SE room, I believe), so I'm speaking only about the rooms I personally use.

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

I touched above on chatbots filling in tooling gaps; that's definitely a problem that's being solved (or at least a temporary solution being hacked together) through chat. Otherwise, my usage of chat is really communication and socializing. It's a coordination tool for mods and curators, a way of discussing issues at length with whoever necessary - from other mods to users I've mod messaged to just other regular users - and a social space.

As a mod, one perhaps weird use of chat that I've used in the past is as documentation for problem users. Not to get too into detail about what exactly needs documenting, but putting information into the site-specific mod chatroom or the TL made that information searchable later on and provided a lot more flexibility and resilience than user annotations. Documenting information in chat meant I wasn't storing PII or other sensitive information on my own device; it was documented in a place visible to other mods and that I would no longer have access to when no longer a mod. There are a couple issues with this practice, which are intrinsically tied to the problems they solve, but here's not the place to get into that, for various reasons. Feel free to reach out to me in the TL for discussion on that particular issue.

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

Tooling - obscure and unintuitive

I've been poking around chat for ten years, and as of eight years ago (oh my god) as a moderator. I'm considered to be very familiar with the quirks of chat and how it works. There are a couple people I know of who have a better handle on some of the details, but overall I have a pretty good sense of how all the tools work (or don't) and how to perform the various actions available to users and mods.
Unfortunately, very few people are that familiar with the tools.

Chat tools are often unintuitive, buried, unlinked, or obscure, and act in ways you don't expect. I'd expect very few people to know that if you're kicked three times in a row from a single room, you lose the ability to create new chat rooms - and even fewer to know where to go to lift that restriction as a moderator. People don't know where to find the tools they have access to, or what to do with them once they find them. I've been experimenting with and using those tools for a very long time, and so they're more-or-less second nature to me personally - but it took a very long time to get there, and it's not uncommon that someone will need to ask how to do something with the chat tools, including very experienced mods. These tools need to be more visible and intuitive, which probably means people like me will have to re-learn how to use them, but that's a sacrifice that it most likely makes sense to make in favor of more people knowing what they're doing.

Flagging - fanning the flames

The current flagging system, in which anyone with a cumulative 10k reputation across sites where they have 200 or more reputation on the network can view and vote on chat flags, often leads to people jumping into heated discussions and getting involved, instead of the flag resulting in quietly removing a problematic message or having a mod step in to use their tools (such as timing out or freezing the room). While the 10k system perhaps makes sense in the single-server-for-a-single-site original design, still extant for Meta.SE and SO, there are enough moderators across the network for the system to have very few advantages left on chat.SE. It is almost always more effective for a moderator to step in with their advanced and more nuanced tooling than for users to remove individual messages with flags, drawing extra attention from all over the network. The end result is often that the situation devolves even further with more users jumping in and arguing until a mod needs to step in anyway. Removing the "make things worse for no reason" step seems like a good idea to me.

Changed your name? No you didn't

While perhaps an issue that not everyone cares about, when browsing historical transcripts (incidentally, an amazingly useful feature that I miss whenever I use a different chat system), username changes aren't reflected. People's old usernames are still visible for everyone to view, unless they've deleted their account. While I don't expect pings in the middle of a message to be rebaked - and doing so would be almost impossible with the current implementation - usernames in direct replies and in the transcript should reflect when a user changes their username. People change their usernames for a number of reasons; I personally changed mine when there was unwelcome attention and drama focused on the network in 2019 and screenshots of the TL transcript had been leaked, and so I changed my username as a precautionary step. Trans users also sometimes change their names, and don't want their deadnames visible anymore; or people stop using their real names for one reason or another and don't want that public. When all you have to do is scroll back a bit in the transcript, it makes that step a lot less effective, no matter what the reasoning for it was.

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

Chat moderators

I have advocated in the past for appointing chat-specific mods to moderate chat, across all servers and in mod-only rooms. While we've introduced TL-specific mods since then, the issue of inconsistent moderation across chat by individual mods, and site mods not necessarily being selected for their chat moderation skills, as well as the other issues detailed in that post, are all still extant.

Way too many userscripts - make them obsolete

I have over 20 userscripts running on chat.SE. Some of those are more general scripts, and some are obsolete at this point, but as a quick list of features added or improved by userscripts, not including Charcoal-related scripts:

• Add a scrollbar to the sidebar with the starboard
• Add a topbar in chat so I can see my inbox and achievements
• Make moving bot messages easier
• Make rot13 messages decode on rollover, since spoilers don't exist in comments or chat
• Make user pronouns easier to see
• Make it possible to purge messages after they've been deleted
• Make it easier to reply to yourself (used to be part of a larger userscript that broke entirely eventually)
• Make it possible to unstar or unpin messages from the transcript

Accessibility

Chat is entirely inaccessible. I've outlined some gaps in the past, and I'm sure if I audited chat at this point now that I know a little bit more about it I'd uncover more issues. Another one off the top of my head is that there's no way to add alt text for images in chat. I personally keep chat on 125% zoom since otherwise all of the text is too small for me. Chat needs an overhaul in terms of accessibility, in pretty much every aspect.

Automatic freezing and deletion needs some attention

Comment chains moved to chat are often automatically deleted after a little while since they're underneath a certain threshold of messages, meaning people under 10k reputation following a link from underneath the post are met with a 404. This means that the messages aren't archived; they're removed. While that's fine in some cases, it's often more useful to just freeze the room instead - leaving it still visible but new messages can't be posted. Similarly, private moderation rooms are frozen after a little while without activity; for specific rooms where non-moderators also have access, this can often defeat the purpose of the room, for those infrequent times that it's needed (I'm thinking of private rooms for Room Owners of popular rooms, for instance; we have one for the Tavern that's kept unfrozen by a userscript AFAIK). This system of automated freezing and deleted needs people to sit down and reconsider how it should work.

License and documentation, please

The chat FAQ is outdated to the point of being laughable. As of very recently, when you went to create a new room, it told you that messages were licensed under cc-by sa 2.5; I've just checked and now it links to 4.0. Unfortunately, there's no license displayed in the transcript or in the room, so you have no way of knowing what license your messages are under (leaving aside labeling older messages under 2.5 and new messages under 4.0 for the moment), even in bookmarked conversations. The licensing issue with chat is a mess if you look into it for more than a minute and it'll take signficant work to sort it out.

Is there anything you’d personally like Chat to be used for that it isn’t today?

I think that what TopAnswers did with chat has a lot of potential; in addition to a general chatroom for each site, each post automatically has an associated chatroom, accessible directly from the post itself. If SE were to adopt something along these lines, and embed a chatroom into the UI when a conversation is moved to chat, it would actually result in chat being used when comments are moved instead of the conversation being abandoned (when continuing it is the goal). As it is, you have to go to chat, effectively creating another account, with a very different feel from the main site; if it was embedded into the parent post, it would be much less of a disruption to move the discussion to chat.

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for? What wouldn’t you want them to use it for? What guardrails would be needed?

I would want new users to use chat as more of a social space. Using chat to ask questions that would be closed as opinion-based on the main site is often fine, but in my time in chat, including the Meta discussion SE Discord server, new users popping in looking for tutoring doesn't go over too well. That's the concering bit about the "fast track" for me; chat doesn't work very well with answering questions as a primary purpose. It's a social space where you go to hang out with your friends, not a place you sit around waiting for people to ask for help every few minutes. That's a sure-fire way to frustrate people, especially since that information is then not documented and so people can end up asking the same things over and over - a problem duplicates were designed to solve on the main site.

Chat should be a community-building space, where people can interact, coordinate, discuss, and socialize. You don't want to be filling out spreadsheets at the water fountain; you want to chat with people in a less formal environment. Overly conflating the social space with the "work" space risks defeating the purpose of the social space. That's not to say that getting help can't be part of the chat ecosystem, but it should not be the primary purpose.

In terms of guardrails, to a certain extent we have the same issue with chat as we do with comments - that reputation is the primary method for stopping spam and abuse. New users gaining access to chat have full access to every regular chatroom, including being able to star, flag, and post messages; our tools for handling some of those things are limited, and opening up wider access means that there could be some paths to abuse opened up that I'd prefer not to elaborate on here. Combined with the issues detailed above with the flagging system, we'd need an overhaul of some of the tooling and a slower opening up of access to chat features.

Chat's been fairly stagnant for the last decade, with only a few signficant changes to the system in that time (such as the TL moderation tools). Making it modern is definitely necessary, but I do have some level of concern about keeping what makes Bonfire special. For instance, adding reactions to messages would certainly be a step in modernizing the system - but would conflict with the minimalist, functional, professional chat we've grown to know and love. Modernizing chat while keeping it unique - and not breaking people's and bots' workflows too much - is going to be a challenge.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

Currently, I mostly use chatrooms which help to coordinate site moderation (ex. SOCVR, SOBotics, Charcoal, etc.) I mostly use it for this out of necessity, because there really isn't any other easy way to coordinate specific moderation (Meta is occasionally useful for broad categories, but you can hardly bring every bad post to request it be dealt with on Meta)

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

I guess helping to solve the problem of there being a bunch of low-quality content on sites.

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

It is a bit annoying that Meta and SO have their own chat sites. As far as I know, there is no reason for this and all it could do is cause problems for users who don't have 20 rep on Meta and SO.

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

Some visibility would be nice. Chat is basically undiscoverable. If you want to be usable as a fast lane, then people need to actually know about it. Perhaps it could be made visible in the same way Meta is, which seems to work pretty well (and even seems to get too much visibility sometimes, getting questions meant for main sites).

I would also like to see the ability for lower rep users to be able to chat. Perhaps this could only be in some rooms, and this would certainly need much better moderation tools, but if you want a fast lane it should be usable for everyone.

In addition, while more minor, it would be nice if chat didn't, you know, look like an artifact of the internet from 15 years ago like it does now (which makes sense, it essentially hasn't been touched in that long).

Something else that I'd like to see is chat mods. Just because someone is chosen to moderate the main site doesn't mean they want to moderate chat. In the same way that Discussions has dedicated discussions mods, what about dedicated chat mods (I'd like for them to be elected though).

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for? What wouldn’t you want them to use it for? What guardrails would be needed?

Honestly, whatever is useful to them (within limits, obviously). If you could get the fast lane idea to work, I'm happy with that. If they want to have a discussion with others (on or off topic of the main site), I'm happy with that.

What I don't want it to be used as is a dumping ground, like what is happening to discussions. Chat should be a duplicate of Q&A, but it still shouldn't consist of "here 100 homework problems, give me the solution" or "give a working code for a complex website that does X".

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

I currently use chat for moderation assistance of the main site primarily (e.g. SOCVR, Charcoal, AI monitoring, Meta activity, etc.), as well as for general chitchat and for the occasional topical discussion (e.g. I'll hop onto a relevant chat and ask a question about programming or whatever site topic that isn't quite ready for--or appropriate for--a formal Q&A question.

Pain points:
What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

• Discoverability both of chat in general but also of various chatrooms once you're in chat. If you are in multiple chatrooms, you can see the latest message of other rooms on the right, which is great, but you can't see other rooms, and you can't (re-)join specific favorited chatrooms if you leave one, from within a chatroom.

• Lack of good moderation options. See my list below under the next quote block. But maybe another way forward would be to elect chat moderators whose job is specifically to moderate chat. They'd have no mod powers/access outside of the chat subdomain(s) but would have additional powers/capabilities for moderating users/behavior/rooms while on the chat subdomain(s). Many traditional moderators loathe chat, and/or avoid it completely.

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

Users need: (Ordered by importance, in my opinion)

• dark mode
• the ability to upload images without auto-posting them, oneboxed/embedded, to chat
• significantly longer timers for editing messages (should be like 10 minutes)
• a way to chat about a Q&A without following normal chatroom freeze timers. Nothing's worse than seeing a "let's continue this conversation in chat" link and finding that it's a dead link/leads to a frozen room.
• the ability to use markdown formatting in multi-line messages
• the ability to see rooms somewhere that they're not currently in (via a left sidebar like Discord?) from their current chatroom.
• to have chatroom audio ping settings be set via their profile so they stop expiring/resetting back to "loud annoying beep" whenever a local cookie expires. Or just make the default setting for that be the "silent" option.

ROs need (Ordered by importance, in my opinion):

• the ability to unfreeze rooms they are owners of, or set a custom freeze time
• the ability to kick users and prevent them from rejoining for user-specified times (and more options than what currently exist), and/or permanently (which can auto-raise a mod flag if necessary).
• the ability to delete users' messages, not just move them to another room. A great middle ground here would be having a read-only archive area for each room that ROs could have the ability to move messages into/out of.
• the ability to re-pin items to the starboard even after a pin has expired.
• a built-in way to discuss things with other ROs for their room in a way that normal users can't see.
• the ability to restrict messages from being moved into a room from some other room. Currently any RO can send any message from their room to any other non-private room which is... easy to abuse.

This is a big proposal, and it might be a complete disaster of an answer. I encourage you to read to the end. It's also a frame challenge on a staff question. But let's see.

You're not just collecting feedback to write a report to file away - you're trying to do something with chat: make it better. I'll skip over "better for who" or "what's better mean", and instead look at "what's stopping you from swinging the hammer and making chat better".

Let's flip your question around:

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face Stack faces when using Chat? How do they affect your Stack's experience?

I'll answer with this XKCD.

.

That last sentence highlights a key problem with improving chat: every change breaks someone's workflow.

Take the first item Mad Scientist said: "The different chat servers [databases] cause confusion". It's a good point, so consider one obvious solution: putting everything on chat.stackexchange.com. Oh wait, this obscure page in the Charcoal wiki (Glossary -> <chat host> -> sentences four & five) documents that having the chat servers matters for rate limiting for SD.

Think the dropdown on messages ("click for message actions") is unintuitive? Well, there's userscripts ^{[1] [2]} used by Charcoal folks that modify how messages appear to make tasks easier.

Charcoal isn't the only group with this issue. And folks can't just keep updating their tools every few weeks.

See the problem? Essentially any change will break something.

Y'all aren't the first company to hit this: Microsoft ran into this (multiple versions of OneNote, Outlook, etc.). So did Reddit (old vs. new Reddit). But I'll suggest not doing what they did, which was make multiple versions of the same app/website, and then deal with the added work for years.

At the same time, breaking stuff like spam protection isn't great either.

Here's my suggestion:

1. Barring urgent changes (e.g., security fixes), leave chat how it is now.
2. Go build chat of the future on devchat.stackexchange.com (or similar). Make that site private, so only certain users can access it, but no NDA - it's just to avoid spam/abuse.
3. Make a Meta post announcing, link it in a few chatrooms, give anyone trustworthy access, and make a SOfT Business instance that anyone with access can use to discuss it.
4. Do all the development there. Have an idea? Try it! It's like a production sandbox. If you break it for a few hours, oh well. It allows folks to migrate stuff over (e.g., SmokeDetector, etc.), while keeping existing chat as a fallback.
5. Once you're happy and key things are migrated (e.g., SmokeDetector), open devchat to anyone. By now, new chat shouldn't just be an MVP - it needs to work. Redirects and all.
6. Mostly freeze updates to both old and new chat. Pick a date six to eight weeks in the future. That date is the EOL for current chat. When that date comes, old chat is discontinued. Not "unsupported but usable". Not "pick which you like more". Gone.

You've now built chat of the future.

The main problem with chat today is that it is virtually undiscoverable. It is as if Stack Overflow is deliberately trying to bury it because it does not fit the Q&A format, but then it begs the question, why even have it at all?

Another problem is that the various rooms are disorganized and chaotic. With a bit of effort you can always find the room you should be in, but the overall impression you get from the room selection page is that of a deeply unofficial, second-tier, unregulated, neglected kind of thing.

Finally, within a room there are no threads, so again, even more disorganization and chaos.

The user interface in the above is also somewhat lackluster, which further adds to the overall impression that the chat area is not the area you want to be in. The whole thing is unwelcoming.

I don't use chat

If you don’t use Chat, or if your usage has declined, what are the reasons for that?

I have been around a pretty long time and have plenty of rep on SO.

SO Chat is basically a thing I'm dimly aware that exists, but never see, apart from the occasional futile and mildly annoying admonition to "take this discussion to chat" in comments. It is weirdly hard to find. (I couldn't have confidently told you to how to get there just now.)

I have tried it a couple of times, but my experience is generally:

• it's very quiet when I'm there, perhaps because of timezones
• the most active channels seem to be for moderators, although they're not clearly labelled as such
• lots of jargon and inside jokes and assumed knowledge and stuff. (Right now the third chat in the list is "GMTs" - no idea what that means. The third chat on Meta.SE is "Wizards Den | Place for all wizards (or wizzards) to share spells, words, and havin…")

Basically I haven't yet experienced any value from using it.

I'm not sure that I would ever really want to hang out on SO chat. I'd probably rather spend time on a Discord focused on my areas of interest. But for stuff specific to SO, specifically discussing issues with the platform or the company, maybe.

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

Honestly it's a bit long ago, but I think I discovered it through just using top bar buttons and seeing the link. First experiences were that it seemed useful, so I stuck around.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

First thing I use it for is to keep track of things, by having feeds for new questions, new meta questions, new hot network questions, have smokedetector reports posted, and there also used to be comment bots (that are currently broken), that comment bot was really helpful in weeding out comment abuse on the other site I moderate. It makes chat a useful place for seeing things that may need attention and keeping track of what's handled.

The second thing I use it for is quick questions/discussions that don't necessarily need a whole meta discussion or comments. Like finding out if my question would be on-topic on a given site, or replying to a new question feeds item with a thought and seeing if others agree.

The final use-case is just hanging out and having a space that allows for being off-topic.

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

For me, chat and the feeds allow for a more focused "track record" at times than the front pages. For example, a spam report for a spam answer in chat from smokedetector is more useful than seeing a question get a new answer on the post of active pages. Seeing a notification that a post made HNQ is easier than going on HNQ and scanning the entire list to check. And in the past, having the comment bot was way more useful than having to visit each post, especially when there were comments (sometimes abusive ones) on old posts.

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

I guess sharing images in chat frustrates me most. I'd like to be able to copy-paste images (without using an userscript), instead of always having to save them and then use the upload button. There's a few feature requests for that, but each time I just want to share a quick image of e.g. stroopwafels to those that don't know them, the whole process isn't quick at all.

Oh, and on mobile I don't get a visual warning when a message gets too long. The send button doesn't gray out, so it's always a guess, if that could be improved that'd be really nice as I can then just stop typing as soon as it grays out instead of having to guess where to cut up my message.

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you? Is there anything you’d personally like Chat to be used for that it isn’t today?

I'd like to use it for comment bots again, and if it could also be used to keep track of questions that are migrated onto a site, that'd be nice too. Right now the new questions feeds don't pick those up.

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for? What wouldn’t you want them to use it for? What guardrails would be needed?

I'd like those new users to basically use it for the things I outlined in the first paragraphs: as an extra tool to help with keeping track of, and building the main site. And perhaps a bit of off-topicness, though chat should not turn into the place where you ask the questions that don't have a place on main, just to avoid quality restrictions.

The one thing I'd want to avoid is chat turning into a place where the same questions/discussions are started each time a new user arrives. I've been in a discord server for a game once, and the same discussions that don't have definitive answers were raised almost twice a day, often a question starting with "what's the best?" without further defining "best". It gets tiring fast, especially if those users don't really behave and start calling each other's opinions stupid and worse. I ran from there, fast.

Pain point suggesting a future use:

On sites I moderate, it's common that we get questions that are off-topic for the site, but that might be fine in chat. Chatty questions seeking career advice, or (text)book recommendations, for example: these are questions we don't really want in a repository of questions about Biology for example, but could be topics of discussion among people interested in biology.

But...there's really no pipeline for that. New users aren't allowed to chat, nothing points them there if they were. Maybe a really "unfriendly" comment like "this belongs in chat" on their question, at best. And if they got there, where would they go? The site's 'main room'? Okay, that's fine. But if a lot of people got pointed there (not really a risk at a moment, but if we're building lanes on a highway or something, let's dream), that room would probably get a bit crowded and disorganized. Overall, the way chat on SE is organized into "rooms" feels really outdated. See e.g. Slack or Discord for a better way to organize into "channels". But then also those don't seem appropriate for the "dumped from comment thread" sort of rooms, which seem to be more temporary, or for direct chats between users.

Pain point suggesting a future pain point:

On the other hand, as a moderator, I really don't want to moderate chat. Lucky for me, people aren't very Chat-y on sites I moderate, but if you're hoping to make them so, I'm worried about the additional noise they'll create. There have been several rooms around the network that are very chatty, and cause a lot more headache than they seem to be worth, to me. So, keep that in mind, I guess.

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

I first discovered it via the sidebar with the active chatrooms. I joined The Nineteenth Byte through that and am now a longstanding member of the TNB community. My first chat message was a Jelly usage question (for context, Jelly is a programming language specifically designed for Code Golf, TNB's host site). For the next month or so, I mostly popped in to ask a Jelly and the occasional Vyxal question, until I joined in one of the convos that happen very often, as you can tell by the transcript. From then on it's history. I am now a Room Owner of both TNB and the main room for Langdev, The Garbage Collector.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

Currently I spend most of my time socializing, talking about various coding problems, and swapping programming language syntaxes.

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

There is no official Chat API for bots_{I made a Kotlin one}. Currently we basically have to emulate a fake user. In Code Golf and Langdev we use them for

• New site posts (on both sites). Yes there is a feed for this, it kinda sucks
• New Code Golf sandbox posts
• Helping to manage a golfing language
• A chat bridge between Chat and Discord

I have also used it to make a TUI client and am currently (trying to) make an Android app for chat.

Besides an official Chat API, the two main things I would like to be improved is the two minute edit timer (make it 10 minutes, at least, or remove it entirely), and the lack of powers that ROs have. Currently the only useful moderation power we ROs have is message moving. Often, we have to ask moderators to edit an announcement for us. At least the ability to edit any message anytime would already be great for ROs.

Also mobile Chat sucks.

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

A lot of the following problems have been solved with userscripts, but an official Chat implementation would be nice.

• Paste to upload (userscript)
• MathJax (userscript)
• A reaction system beyond starring
• Typing indicators (userscript)
• An easy way to do polls
• An easier way to find and switch between rooms (something like Discord maybe?)
• A more easily searchable and look-through-able transcript
• Some sort of private chat. Currently we typically use Discord for this

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for? What wouldn’t you want them to use it for? What guardrails would be needed?

Anything a typical chatroom would be used for. Asking questions, hanging out, getting banned for spam.

Remarks

TNB is very informal, the multitude of conversations that happen there are enjoyable to participate in, and it is very hard not to log on to TNB every day. In fact, we find it so enjoyable that we have contingencies in place for if Chat ever gets discontinued. Despite it being Code Golf's main chatroom, actual code golf content makes up a minority of the chatter (although we do have a rule that prioritizes that content so it won't get lost). Typically it's at least tangentially programming related, but occasionally we get into politics, social issues, or talk about things we do in our real lives (we have those, right?). That is the reason (I think) that TNB is one of, if not the most, active chatroom on the network: despite it being a main chatroom, we do not restrict it to site topics. This is a good thing: as I've talked about in this answer, active chatrooms give back to the community as a whole, such as fixing problems with userscripts (both in Chat and on main sites), encouraging activity on main sites, and even creating main sites (as I've talked about in the linked answer).

First off, thanks for asking. Community input can only be a good thing when designing things for the community.

Second,

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

Periodically I will use it to extend a discussion about a post from comments (as many other users do) and sometimes I check in on some of the main chat rooms per site, e.g. the h bar for Physics SE. In many cases, those main chats are considered a good place to ask questions that might be off-topic for the main site, or just to generally talk with other users at greater length than would be permitted by comments.

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

Problems I’m solving would be primarily issues with posts, especially on sites like Physics, Philosophy, Worldbuilding, etc. where extended discussion regarding a particular answer/question is more likely. I notably see a lot less of this on smaller sites and more concrete-sites especially: if you can cite some facts and details, you’re typically not going to get into a longer discussion.

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

It’s old, and it shows a bit. The UI on most of chat.stackexchange.com doesn’t line up with that of the rest of the site, which can be a bit jarring, plus it’s the tab on my computer that takes the longest to load every single time.

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

Just a bit of a UI patch. At least making it stylistically more similar to the rest of SE would make things easier for me in particular, but maybe that’s just me.

Ideally, I’d want to be able to pick a chat room based on its parent site/search by my most recent, rather than the weird stuff going on right now over on Chat SE.

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for? What wouldn’t you want them to use it for? What guardrails would be needed?

Good example: asking homework-ish questions on Physics SE. There, it’s explicitly a rule not to ask “help me do my homework?” or “did I do this right?” because it’s never useful to anyone else (among other reasons), so it’s off-topic for the main site. We have a close-vote reason specifically for it. Much more often, though, those kinds of comprehension questions do get asked in chat, and answered to great effect. I don’t know how many parallels can be drawn to other sites, but at least there, new users knowing “conceptual questions go on the main site, and for specific help you can come try chat” would be great.

While I don't entirely know why this has come to be or how to fix it, the main problem with Chat is the amount of users participating in it: there's too few.

While some rooms are constantly bustling with chat, many really are on the verge of... death.

Security.se's room, The DMZ, for example, often goes multiple days – and sometimes even weeks – without any activity.
_{And, quite frankly, this makes me rather sad.}

To quote Journeyman Geek:

You need at least half a dozen regulars and no more than about 20 for a good, lively chatroom. Too many and there's noise. Too little and the chat doesn't flow.

I want to put emphasis on the "too little and the chat doesn't flow", because, currently, this is the way it feels in many rooms.

I often want to refresh my memory by rereading a conversation I had five years ago. I have a good memory for phrasing, so this is usually not too difficult, but I've often wished for a way to search all chatrooms associated with a given site. Currently, we can search a specific room, or all rooms, and that's it.

Because my usage of chat is far less today than it was 5-7 years ago, for "reasons", I'm going to focus my feedback on the experience it was back then, when it was far more active.

The main issue we were running into when managing a busy chat room was effectively dealing with problem users. We effectively had five tools:

1. Warning. This is hardly a tool, but it was the first step when a user was getting close to crossing a line or otherwise being disruptive.
2. Move Message. This was often used in combination with #1, but not always. It's the only tool RO's have for getting rid of problematic content that doesn't result in far heavier consequences.
3. Kick-mute. This would kick the user from the given room and time them out for an increasing amount of time per kick-mute, and it would raise an auto-mod flag. This was quite effective, probably the most effective tool we have for dealing with a user that is being very problematic, but it also tended to be a bit noisy and drew unwanted mod attention to a chat room when it was particularly active and routinely had such users that needed to be kick-muted.
4. Red Flag. This would flag a post as rude/abusive and raise a notification to every active chat member with at least 10k rep. This flag is incredibly noisy and often does more harm than good by attracting other members to join a room that is already potentially dealing with an issue, causing RO's to now have to also deal with an influx of people poking their noses in to see what's going on.
5. Mod Flag. This would raise a flag to moderators only, which generally is fine, but because not all mods were regular chat users, and more often than not weren't frequent visitors of the given room, they weren't always well aware of what was going on in that room and could respond poorly, causing more problems than it helps. That's not to say mods shouldn't be a part of the process, rather, maybe if we're going to bring chat back into the limelight, we should have mods that specialize in that.

General usage of these tools as an RO mostly ranged in 1 2 and 3, in that order, and both 4 and 5 would usually be avoided due to the potential problems they could cause. This meant that, as an RO, we couldn't actually delete problematic messages... all we can do is move them to another room where they can't be viewed in context. This made investigating problematic events very difficult because we kept having to tab back and forth between two different transcripts comparing timestamps.

Now to your questions:

Current use cases:

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

I first discovered chat when a chatty conversation was moved to chat. I generally hate this feature because more often than not it just ends the conversation, it doesn't move it. Some time after that first experience I found the JavaScript chat and became active there, eventually becoming an RO.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

Currently I use chat as simply a place to hang out, as well as a place to keep tabs on what gets posted on MSO through the MSO Question feed that is attached to The Meta Room. I used to also use it to keep tabs on comments made on MSO, before updates to security/processes rendered those tools unmaintainable.

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

None, really, it's a social location.

Pain points:

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

Lack of a dark mode is very frustrating, I can't imagine using chat without my dark mode extension.

Mobile Mode is seriously lacking in features, compared to desktop mode. Desktop mode is very difficult to use on mobile. So in either case using chat on mobile is unpleasant.

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

For my usage today? not really.. but looking back at how we used chat back when it was hyper active in the JavaScript room, being able to have threads that exist within the given room and are owned/monitored/moderated by the same RO's that existed as a list in the side bar would have been very useful, we could have used that to move interesting discussions into their own little buckets as to not interrupt the general discussion happening in the main area.

Future use:

Is there anything you’d personally like Chat to be used for that it isn’t today?

I would like to see chat be a place any new user can just hop in and ask a simple question in, and potentially get directed to where they need to be. This is how JavaScript chat functioned back in the day, anyone (with enough rep) could just hop in and get help with simple things or get directed to the right place to get help. Today chat is too inactive for that to really be a thing.

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for? What wouldn’t you want them to use it for? What guardrails would be needed?

See above for how I'd want them to use it, what i wouldn't want users to use it for is posting links to their own posts to get more attention. I think that's an abuse of what chat is for... however i'm not sure we really need guardrails to prevent that. We don't want to prevent posting links to questions or answers, we should just have, as RO's, adequate tools for dealing with it. Being able to move such posts to a thread, as described above, would probably be a workable general solution to this problem, giving users a place to share posts they want help with that doesn't disrupt existing conversations.

If you don’t use Chat, or if your usage has declined, what are the reasons for that?

I'm in a very strange situation where I want to use chat, I do, but most chatrooms are a lot quieter, and the communities are often elsewhere.

Current use cases:

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

Back in the day, chat and meta were on the top bar. I wandered into root access and never really left. I just got in and talked, and people got used to me. While I'm primarily active on super user, back in the day serverfault had a thriving community as well.

And honestly? We just talked a lot, and a lot of those conversations still exist but elsewhere. I'd someone complain about my then idiosyncratic tendency to use "i" instead of "I" to refer to myself. We talked about computer builds, or sometimes stuff that happened at work. I once talked about my late dog being ill, and someone got confused and thought I was sick.People cared about each other, and even where people left, that sense of community still exists on the offsite offshoots. That said, chat linked to a bigger resource is discoverable, and most of those spaces are stagnant.

While most of SE was asocial, chat was the most human part of it. Unfortunately between neglect, and not really recovering from various outbreaks of drama, its a lot quieter than it used to be. Chat had heart and should be a counterbalance to the sites being more stuffy.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

Well, I still primarily use it as chat, or as a third space. As a moderator, I sometimes use it for collaborative tasks where the current tools fall apart

Right now, my most active room is one where people have been reporting spam accounts for destruction to deal with the current spam wave. It serves two purposes - to speed up handling of spam (and while flags get rid of posts, these accounts often post more than once), and quite frankly, lets me touch base with my community and makes our work more visible.

Historically I'd talk about my computer builds, and the searchable transcript is great for looking up things in the past

Sometimes I also share dog pictures.

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

As above. But chat is, also the fun space, so its not all work.

Pain points: What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

Amusingly enough, despite wanting development on chat, I'd say its nearly perfect. I'd love a more modern image uploader, and dark theme, but that its essentially IRC with upgrades is lovely, and I run a few old scripts that make things like replies easier.

That main rooms freeze due to inactivity is an issue - I'd love a way to permathaw a room, and of course, chat being inactive is a bug.

Also, its a 'me' problem but I'd really like the sidebar on desktop chat with the room list to scroll. I need to clean up but it kinda becomes hard to use with too many chatrooms on a smaller screen.

Its an older problem but letting mods view who starred things would help with star spam, and having better tools to monitor problem users would be nice - like cleaning up the slightly hidden recent chat flags listing and making it searchable.

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

A better image uploader, dark mode.

I run a pair of user scripts, sechatmodifications and chat reply helper (which lets me hit colon and up to reply to a post), I find them essential for full keyboard use, but updates might break these. I'd love changes to consider full keyboard use as well as mobile use.

While I'm not a dev - I do believe that a chat API would be useful and we shouldn't have critical tools rely on chat being unchanging

If two people have the same name, you can't selectively ping one. A less super superping would be nice. Basically let me @@ someone in a room without being a mod.

Future use: Is there anything you’d personally like Chat to be used for that it isn’t today?

I'd like for chat to go back to its historical use as a common community space on the network. Especially on the less technical/smaller sites, it would do us good to have a constantly active space.

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for? What wouldn’t you want them to use it for? What guardrails would be needed?

Interestingly, I'd say having it as a third space, and workshopping posts. Generally using chat for Q&A ends with people finding answers and not moving on to posting, and some people practically only use chat to ask questions - its a problem as old as chat going back to IRC. Most of the solutions we'd need are cultural over technical om that respect though.

Also, while it wasn't asked, SE's inline threads is perfect and should be maintained.

Current use cases:

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

I think I just clicked on the icon/chat link when exploring the page:

Fun fact: I only ever started positing on meta (mso) because of chat.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

1. Supporting SU against spam by reporting accounts Why? I lack the privileges to nuke the accounts myself.
2. Asking questions I deem too small/irrelevant for meta, like why a specif flag was helpful despite no action being taken. Why? No need to fill meta with posts almost no one will care about, also given the voting behaviour I'd be sitting at -512 rep :) When needed I "escalate" a question to a proper question.
3. Memes Why? The atmosphere on the network has changed in ways that I don't think any fun posts be appreciated outside the small scope of chat.

Follow ups by EmmaBee: "Some have suggested activity has declined making this more difficult: “Perhaps asking on clarifications or if someone knows if a question already exists” would you agree/disagree there is enough activity on the chat rooms you participate in? Which ones are you in most often?"

I mostly participate on the follwing rooms (feel free to visit even if you usually dont use the chat room functions!):

In those rooms there is enough traffic to keep them usable. But I am quite new in this corner of the internet so I can not compare it to the "golden age" of high traffic.

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

Combating spam and so can you

Pain points:

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

Overall no problems apart from the known issue of notification sounds somehow reactivating themselves

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

Add a page where I can see & search all chat messages posted by me per chat room or generally a search for chats.

Future use:

Is there anything you’d personally like Chat to be used for that it isn’t today?

Would be nice to see more staff have their joining/ maybe even have their own rooms to interact with the community in a less formal way.

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for?

Same thing it is used for today? Perhaps asking on clarifications or if someone knows if a question already exists?

What wouldn’t you want them to use it for?

Yet another social network.

First of relevant xkcd:

SE's primary purpose is to distribute knowledge. It is not primary there to hang out, argue with strangers*, doomscroll etc. Unnecessary focus on anything else does not enrich the experience, it detract from it by bloating the site. E.g Wikipedia works as well as it does because it keeps it simple. When I open an article I am not asked to sign up or try out [insert trending gimmick that has nothing to do with the actual reason I am here]. Instead I simply get the article I wanted.

In contrast there is Govee, a company selling light fixtures - with an app of course.

Outstandingly the worst aspect of this glorified light switch app is that it has an entire social network to go with it:

Essencially they made another twitter clone:

See for yourself: https://community.govee.com/

Needles to say that this an entirely unnecessary feature. A waste of engineering time that could have been used to fix some of the actual bugs/issues of the app or actually improve it.

Just don't do that with chat.

What guardrails would be needed?

Perhaps have a setting for room owner that they can restrict who can write in their room e.g. you have to have at least 75 reputation. That would prevent rooms that are used to coordinate important things from being flooded with irrelevant messages by user that don't know what they are doing

* Ok, well at least in theory.

Another TNBer here, I guess you can add my experiences to the pile.

I believe fellow TNB room owner Ginger will shortly post her own answer which deals mainly with moderation and API access. I stand by everything she will say in that answer (though most of it has been stated multiple times on this post already), and I don't think it's relevant to say it in this answer as well.

To get us started, this ground my gears a bit:

A fast lane for quick, real-time interaction, with features like Chat that can bring the community together to discuss topics instantly.

From the surrounding context, it seems you're expressing a sentiment (whether this is the current, or intended future sentiment about chat is unclear) that SE, Inc. views chat as "Q&A but faster". Maybe my perspective is skewed by codegolf's weird nature as not-actually-a-q&a, but I don't believe chat to serve this role currently, and I don't think it is a good idea to make it that.
Chat (as a general thing, including e.g. discord) is the single worst possible way of having a repository of answers. I am a member of multiple communities outside SE that, by tradition, use discord as tech support, even for common and recognized issues. A server going down means answering the same question every few minutes to each new person coming in asking why the server is down. Almost all of us run the discord equivalent of userscripts to automate or alias away this. It sucks and I can't see why you would want to ever make such a thing voluntarly.

It's also possible this isn't what this meant at all, in which case let's just call the previous paragraph a cautionary tale and move on.

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

I've been a TNBer for about a year. I had just changed several things in my personal life, and rediscovered codegolf.SE through HNQ. After getting a few upvotes, my inbox informed me that I was now cleared to talk with the people writing these insane answers, and honestly I felt right at home.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

I have TNB in a pinned tab. I religiously read every single message passing through it even when I wasn't online to the point it's affecting my work sometimes. It's somewhat of a problem. I make a point to only frequent chat while at work, leading to jokes that I'm paid to be there.

Chat is almost entirely the sole reason I stay on stackExchange

I wouldn't say that I'm using chat though. In the literal sense, I am, but it's like saying that I am using a cafe to talk with my friends. I am in the cafe with my friends, and we are here because we'd like to talk with each other.

I also frequent the Vyxal room, about the eponymous programming language made for code golf. Since everyone there is also a TNB regular, the conversation is very much focused almost exclusively on Vyxal and related tomfoolery.

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

Having the main developper of a programming language on speed dial is pretty nice when that language is particularly obtuse, but generally I dont come to chat with problems, I am simply hanging out.

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

Mobile UI is horrendous to the point I generally refuse to use it. I believe that a good mobile UI is orders of magnitude more important for chat (or at least, my use of it) than a good mobile UI for Q&A, because small screen is for friends and big screen is for work.

A recurrent problem with have in TNB is that without site mod action in our chat mod room, the room will freeze despite ROs talking there. we end up pinging a site mod every 5 days, and it feels like something that happens on baby's first IRC implementation, not on one of the major websites of the internet.

I feel there's unnecessary friction created in the less active chatrooms, because of the "last message x hours ago" text. I think it dispromotes taliking in less-active chatrooms out of some fucked up want to not necropost. As a user, being explicitly told the chat i'm about to speak in has been a dead town for several hours (or even days!) does not make me want to post.
My suggestion for this is to forgo this text entirely, unless it's above, say 7 days. It can still appear between sent messages, for context, but i don't think expliciting the time before a message is sent does any good.

Another Major (it's really minor but I constantly experience friction) annoyance of mine is that chat's formatting syntax is it's own special brand, for no good reason. I get why # headings don't work, but having formatting not work if the message is multiline is asinine, having different syntax for strikethrough than on mainsite makes no sense (i still can't remember what it is in chat). I'd like code formatting to be more obvious (and work multiline).

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

A well-specified API, ideally with less obtuse login flow, would be great for several projects of mine.

I think taking a look at the userscripts people have shared in this thread is a great place to start foor the features people have proven they want:

Is there anything you’d personally like Chat to be used for that it isn’t today?

Not really, no.

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for? What wouldn’t you want them to use it for? What guardrails would be needed?

I think that in terms of usage, chat is in a good place, in that if more users came to chat, I would want it to stay significantly the same except more active.

If more users were to come to chat, the moderation tools would need a significant upgrade. the current situation only works because so few people use chat that there are fewer troublemakers.

Feel free to pop in TNB and ask questions there! After all, comments aren't for extended discussion ;)

Stack Exchange Chat is a significant part of my life

A decade with 100,000 messages written in well over 100 chat rooms…

Current use cases:

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

• "Let's continue this discussion in chat…" link from a comment discussion on a post of mine.

• Later, I found the Code Golf community to be very engaging and welcoming, and a fertile ground for promoting APL.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

• I mainly use Chat for my own chat room, where I learn, teach, ask, code, golf, and discuss usage of APL and related programming languages.

• I also participate in the Code Golf community via its main chat room.

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

• I'm trying to build the community around APL (and array programming languages in general). Stack Exchange chat gives me a free, no-spam, easy-to-access, simple-to-use chat functionality, that has good discoverability and integration with the Stack Exchange network.

• Especially when teaching and demonstrating APL, I need a way to intermingle chat messages and execute code in such a way that others can see it. SE Chat's simple semantic HTML, allows user stylesheets and userscripts per my needs.

• I've also needed to schedule chat events, and to my delight found that SE Chat supports this, with email and banner reminders, bookmarkable conversations with participation statistics, and more. In fact, only thanks to these features, have I become the author of a book, and have recorded 110 videos totalling almost 24 hours of original content!

• I also use a skinned feed bot in Chat to notify me of posts from around the network that I should consider answering.

Pain points:

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

• Buggy chat markdown

• Inability for me as a room owner to grant people write access, therefore having had to track down and bother a moderator well over a hundred times

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

• Ability to reorder and rename bookmarks after they are created

• Ability to reply to my own message without jumping through hoops

• A more generally suited font stack

• A proper API so people can create reliable chat bots (the one I had before it suddenly broke was wildly popular)

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

Hmm... Hard to say exactly what my early experiences were, since I've been on the network and used chat since at least 2017 or so. (My SE chat profile claims it's existed since 2013, but that seems... incorrect, since I've only been on RPG.SE since 2017 and my MSE profile claims I've been here since 2016 somehow.) But I assume I found it via the Role-Playing Games Stack Exchange site, either because I saw that some comments were moved to chat, or because someone linked to chat in a welcome message for a new user (whether that user was me or someone else).

Overall, I think my early experiences in chat were what made the site feel like a community; the Q&A format itself – including Meta – very much tries to remove the human element (focusing on questions and answers), but communities arose around the sites in spite of that, and chat is what allowed that community element to thrive. If not for chat, I probably would never have stuck around as long as I did.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

Nowadays, I mostly use it to stay in touch with the many users I've connected with over the years. Chat activity has definitely dwindled on the RPG site's chat rooms lately, but I still poke my head in every now and then. I also use it to talk to folks about broader philosophical discussions about the SE network.

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

...None? I wouldn't really say having a discussion with friends about life or what I'd like to see change about the SE network is necessarily "solving problems". Most of those conversations are not directly with staff, so it's just about catching up with others and wondering what might happen in the future.

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

Hmm... I think the main challenge/frustration is how much of the chat functionality works differently from the main sites, and how much of it is undocumented (or it's poorly documented and I have to do a bunch of digging to figure out how something works/what something means). The Q&A platform has been modernized over the years and a lot of functionality is made a lot clearer to users in terms of how it works, but chat hasn't had those usability improvements made to it.

In addition, chat moderation is a mess, and the fact that there are 3 different chat databases (SO, MSE, and then SE (for every other site on the SE network)) just adds another layer of unnecessary complication. And then chat moderation is also sort of a mess as a result of that, because spam/offensive flags and custom mod flags appear to everyone with that privilege across that chat database – which can cause confusion/frustration when non-English flags come in for content on foreign-language SO/SE sites, for instance.

In my opinion, it would be much better if all the sites' chat rooms shared a basic framework, but were able to be more tailored to each site's individual needs. For instance, RPG.SE moderation actions like suspensions should maybe carry over to RPG.SE chat rooms but not elsewhere in chat, and vice versa. (I'm not sure what the logistics of this would be like... I'm not sure if it'd make more sense to have a chat profile that's shared among every site, including MSE and SO, but separate from your profile on any individual Q&A site – or if it'd make more sense to have no separate chat profile at all, but rather just tie your chat contributions/participation to your profile on the main site associated with a given chat room.)

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

Hmm... The ability to paste images into chat (automatically uploading them in the same way Discord does if you paste an image in there), rather than having to first save/find the direct image link and then reupload it, would be nice. Besides that, chat moderation tooling needs some substantial overhauling/improvements.

Is there anything you’d personally like Chat to be used for that it isn’t today?

Nothing comes to mind. I like Chat being used as a place to get immediate feedback on stuff, whether that's helping brainstorm a question or help finding a possible duplicate, or general chitchat and getting to know people, or brainstorming site-meta type questions before you post them. The things that chat should be used for are included amongst the things it's already used for, I think. But I can't really think of other things I would like it to be used for... Except maybe more direct conversations with staff (kind of like Prashanth did with the AMA follow-up post) about both work-related and non-work-related topics – as has been common in the past, and is still common with many/most of the CMs.

The main problem with chat is discoverability. Most folks on a Q&A site don't even know about Meta or how it works – and even fewer folks know that chat even exists. (While links to Meta posts appear in the community bulletin under "Featured on Meta" or "Hot Meta Posts", among other places, chat links rarely appear in the UI outside of the site-switcher – except when comments get moved to chat, either manually by the mods, or by the site prompting 2 users having an extended conversation to move to chat.)

I think that if more folks knew it was there, we could have more of a conversation about what it's getting used for, but on many sites, there's simply no community because the folks there don't know there's a place for it.

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for? What wouldn’t you want them to use it for? What guardrails would be needed?

I think a key issue is that chat shouldn't be getting used to replace the main site(s), or as a way to get around the main site's rules. It's fine to ask a question in chat that wouldn't be allowed on the main site (e.g. game-recommendation questions in RPG.SE), but users shouldn't just ask their questions that belong on the main site in chat instead just because they think it'll get a quicker answer. They also shouldn't be spamming links to their own questions in chat in an attempt to demand an immediate answer.

That said, both of these things do already happen, just at a smaller scale. I'm not sure there necessarily needs to be tooling that automatically prevents this sort of thing, depending on the scale of the problem, but at the very least there could be onboarding/guidance to ensure that folks understand what chat is for and what it's not for.

Use Cases

I know this may sound useless... but nowaday I use the Chat to... well... chat.

What I mean is that moderation aside (we all know some rooms are actively used as integrating parts of content moderation tools like Smokey/Charcoal and so on) chat usage has been on the decline, to the point that is not realistic anymore to seek help on most not-SO sites main rooms (see for example the SharePoint room - last message dates to about one year ago from now). The few "alive" rooms left are basically a bunch of regulars chatting about their specific interests. This should be quite blatant if you look at rooms for topics like Anime or Videogames (that would be Arqade) - you would expect to find people constantly discussing their favorites... instead it is empty most of the time.

Pain Points

Since by now the chat is just an hang out place, my "pain points" are basically things that impair the chat usage as... a chat platform.

• no spoiler markdown support. Any time someone wants to discuss something that may be a spoiler, they resort to creative workarounds like posting fake links with the hidden test spoiler.
• the image upload button works differently from the corresponding feature on the main site.
  • there is no paste image support.
  • the max supported seems to be different from the main site (I had images that the chat threw an error on upload just fine on the main site)
  • some recent formats cause problems (webp mostly)
  • note that the feature is poorly implemented on the main site too: the paste image feature supports higher resolutions than the upload and will automatically shrink the image for you.

Future use

Unless general chat usage suddenly increases by several orders of magnitude, I don't see myself use chat for much else than chatting and the occasional spams hunt the few days I fell less burnt out from the main site drama. Turning the chat in a "fast answers channel" isn't simply doable at this point because chat is simply lacking the "critical mass" userbase numbers to do do.

I guess that the company MAY be thinking to use AI to fix the "missing users" issue and for example add some "answer chatbots" to the chat. If that is the case, I seriously suggest you folk to have at the very least PRIVATE one users rooms dedicated to that. Trust me, whatever you may try to do to secure the bot, someone WILL manage to turn it into a "dating chat". It already happened with regular users bots being abused by trolls (thus putting the owner on suspensions or getting rooms deleted)... don't think you can escape this.

Please add a button to create a chat associated with a question. Manual process is very convoluted. Automated process with comment conversion kicks in too late.

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

Discovered it through comment notification - "Would you like to move this discussion to chat?". I liked it. But I was irritated to discover later that chat rooms are temporary, hard to find and would get deleted or frozen (with no more participation allowed). The process to find out out how to create a new chat room was also frustrating.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

To have a discussion with some user(s) to improve a Q or A, or even discuss and debate a topic in a Q&A.

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

It helps in communicating faster and more directly with users which helps me collaborate better with others here.

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

Chatrooms getting deleted / deactivated / frozen due to inactivity. The process to access a chat room is unnecessarily cumbersome. All this is just plain irritating and wastes time.

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

Permanent chat rooms that don't get deleted / deactivated / frozen due to inactivity. They should exist for ever till the owner deletes it. User created chat rooms should be easily accessible (and searchable) through a drop-down menu.

Is there anything you’d personally like Chat to be used for that it isn’t today?

They should partially replace comments in some SEs that generate a lot of comments.

Some SEs like Skeptics, History and Po.SE etc. face a particular issue in that many of the Q&A generate a lot of discussions in comment due to the nature of their subject. Chats can offer a solution to tackle this kind of challenge.

I suggest that in these SEs, comments should be restricted only to those with review privileges, moderators and the original poster - to offer specific feedback (which is what comments are meant for). But the first comment to any Q&A should be an auto-generated link to a permanent SE chatroom where everyone else - all members of the SE - can go and discuss the subject of the Q or A in any manner they wish. After a certain period, all constructive / feedback comment can be permanently moved into a second chatroom (linked to as the second comment under a Q&A). All future comments can then be either deleted or (constructive ones) moved to the second chatroom as appropriate by the mods.

The second chatroom is needed, in my opinion to help with moderation issues in these kind of SEs. For example, a controversial question is often voted to close or reopen many times over a period of time. I often leave a comment explaining why I VTC or not. If after a few months the Q comes back to the review queue, and my comment has been deleted, it just makes my job tougher trying to figure out if anything has changed. If the comment is instead moved to the feedback chatroom, I / others can easily review it again and do the necessary moderation task better.

Current use cases:

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

I first learned about Chat when access to Russian websites and payments from abroad were suddenly restricted. I was looking for Russian-language programming courses available for payment from Europe and wanted to connect with Russian-speaking developers to improve my skills in my native language.

When I first entered Chat on July 27, 2022, I had the following impressions:

• Initial impression: The interface felt outdated, reminiscent of forums from the 2008s.
• Compact message area: Everything felt a bit cramped.
• Strange chat descriptions: Some of the wording was unusual, even slightly off-putting.
• Confusing content: One of the chats was full of "ping pong" messages, making it hard to understand the purpose of the space.

Later, I occasionally revisited Chat, asked minor questions related to the site, and even some coding questions, but I found the experience inconvenient. Additionally, the chatrooms were often empty.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

• Code sharing.
• Getting opinions and updates on Meta that might otherwise go unnoticed (for example, today I discovered Movies Stack Exchange).
• Discussing questions that aren’t worth a full post but could benefit from insight from an experienced community member. By the way, I also found this post through Chat—thank you, @Anton Menshov! I once mentioned that I wished Chat would be improved, and he pointed me here. Proof that dreams do come true! 🙂

What problems (big or small) are you solving with Chat today?

Chat is useful for quick interactions that don’t require a full post, but its functionality is quite limited. It helps with small discussions, but some usability issues make it less effective than it could be.

Pain points:

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

• Editing messages on mobile is tricky. Sometimes I try to "edit" a message but accidentally hit "delete."

• The notification sound feels a bit harsh; a softer tone would improve the experience.

• The design could be more user-friendly and modern.

• Trying to tap on a reply sometimes triggers 'flag message' instead.

• Lack of proper notifications. It would be great to enable mobile notifications (opt-in, like Telegram).

• The message input box is too small. Interestingly, pasting text from a notepad allows for longer messages—why?

• The search feature is awkward. It opens a new browser window, and search terms aren’t highlighted. (I haven't even tried this on mobile.)

• Messages can’t be deleted after one minute. Sometimes we share personal info in the moment, but there’s no way to remove it afterward.

These issues aren't critical, but fixing them would make Chat much more pleasant and effective. If the team decides to work on improvements, I’d love to contribute in any way I can, even though I’m still learning!

Are there any missing features or improvements that would make Chat more useful for you?

Chat is functional, but improvements would really elevate the experience! Some key things that would help:

• More intuitive mobile UI.
• A better notification system.
• The ability to delete messages after a reasonable time frame.
• A modernized design

Future use:

Is there anything you’d personally like Chat to be used for that it isn’t today?

It would be great if Chat were more visible on the main site. Right now, it’s only easy to find on Meta. Perhaps a small, unobtrusive link under questions could direct users to a relevant chatroom for discussion.

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for? What wouldn’t you want them to use it for? What guardrails would be needed?

• Ideal use cases: Knowledge-sharing, discussions, code exchange.
• What Chat shouldn’t become: Spam, flame wars, or a place for harassment.

To maintain a welcoming space, moderators and bots could help filter inappropriate messages and links

Chat has huge potential, and even small improvements could make it an essential tool for Stack Exchange users. I appreciate that this conversation is happening, and I’m excited to see where it leads!

EmmaBee's questions and my answers:

I would love to know more about what "code sharing" is. Are you sharing for feedback? Optimization? A problem you are having? Or something else? (If you can link to any previous chats, I would love to see real examples).

"Code sharing" in Chat serves multiple purposes, depending on the situation. Sometimes, it's for feedback or optimization, but often, it's just to get quick help with a problem that doesn’t necessarily require a full Q&A post.

For example, I recently had a discussion with @Uranus, who was incredibly patient and thorough in sharing their experience and answering my questions:
🔹 Chat message

This chat was actually created by @Amgarak, and thanks to them, it seems like conversations there have become more active—which is great to see!

As for C++, we have a specialist, @avp, who maintains the C++ chat, but as you can see, it's often empty. He does this because he is truly passionate about his field, and as a highly skilled expert, he has a lot to pass on to the next generation:
🔹 C++ chat transcript

For C#, here’s an example of my own "solo conversation"—even just writing my thoughts down helped me process the problem:
🔹 C# chat transcript from August 8, 2023
However, this particular chat log is from two years earlier.

How do you approach this when chatrooms are empty, as you said?

I simply write my question anyway! Even if no one replies immediately, I’ve had cases where just typing it out in Chat helped me think through the problem and come up with a solution myself. It almost feels like the platform has its own programming wisdom spirit. 😊

I am also curious, what are some examples of "Discussing questions that aren’t worth a full post"? Is this like when comments on Q&A move to Chat, or are you talking about something else here?

Ah, yes, of course! This includes cases where discussions from comments on Q&A get moved to Chat, which can be really useful. However, there are also individual cases where someone has a small question that might not justify a full Q&A post, and Chat could provide a space to get quick feedback without cluttering the main site.

On ru.SO, beginner-friendly questions sometimes get closed if they are not well-formulated. Unlike en.SO, we don’t have a well-developed https://stackoverflow.com/help/what-is-staging-ground mechanism for drafting and refining questions before posting. In general, new features and improvements take a long time to reach ru.SO. 😕

In Chat, a new programmer can ask someone directly without worrying about strict Q&A rules. Chat exists, and as I said, I believe it is important and useful. It shouldn’t replace Q&A, but it complements it by offering an informal space for discussion.

The current workflow for running bots is informal - you create an alternate account, work up to 20 reputation on one site, and run the bot on it.

I'd like a formalish system for this - have a minimum reputation requirement for creating clearly labelled chatbot accounts (higher than 20), have a owner of record linked to it (and perhaps allowing transfers). I'd also suggest gradually sunsetting regular bots - disallowing new ones, and migrating existing ones to a new framework.

A better system for community moderation

Right now, chat has a three-tiered moderation system:

• Room owners are responsible for dealing with personal disputes, spam, and the like in the rooms they own.
• Users with 10k or more network-wide reputation vote on the validity of spam/offensive flags.
• Moderators handle mod flags and have the ability to perform a wide range of actions to handle uncommon, high-priority scenarios, like redacting messages or changing rooms' parent sites.

In my experience as a moderator of communities, both on and off SE, the best kind of moderation tools are those that empower moderators to act quickly and decisively to contain the problem, so they can triage it and decide on a course of action without actively fighting the instigator. The chat moderation systems are currently not very good at this. Consider these scenarios:

1. A member of a chatroom is persistently making jokes which are inappropriate for that room. This scenario is perhaps the best case for chat's moderation tools: room owners have the ability to kickmute the user, and other room members may raise spam/offensive flags. However, both kickmuting and flagging are blunt instruments; three kickmutes will suspend a user, as will a sufficient number of flags. Additionally, room owners cannot provide a message to show to a kickmuted user.
2. A new user with very little reputation joins a room and begins sending gibberish. The user will experience ratelimiting almost instantly, any room owners which are present can kickmute the user, and other members can use moderator flags to get the attention of a moderator, who can then issue a suspension. Spam flags, despite their name, are not very effective in this situation, because they don't have an immediate effect, instead requiring enough 10k+ users to vote on the flag for the user's account to be temporarily suspended. Three kickmutes are also required to trigger a temporary suspension, requiring extra effort on the part of the room owners.
3. Two users are having a heated argument in a room which was created from the comments of a Q&A post, and one of them raises a spam/offensive flag. This flag will then appear to every 10k+ user currently active on the network, dragging them into an argument which they lack context for. If enough of them mark the flag as valid, the target user will then be suspended, likely making them even more unhappy. This scenario occurs with enough regularity that jokes have been made in The Nineteenth Byte about the volatility of Math.SE users in reference to the number of spam flags originating from that site's chatrooms.

My suggestions are threefold:

1. Change the "kickmute" tool to just "mute", and change its functionality to be more like Discord's "timeout" tool. Require room owners to provide a reason, and allow them to specify a duration of up to 24 hours. When a user is muted, instead of disconnecting them from the room entirely, only disable the message input (replacing it with the supplied reason) and the ability to do things like star messages; additionally, hide them from the user list. Room owners can then use a short duration to reprimand misbehaving users, and a long one to temporarily remove spammers so moderators can deal with them.
2. Remove spam/offensive flags entirely. Instead, have moderator flags show a prompt similar to the one which appears on Q&A sites, allowing users to easily describe the nature of the problem or enter freeform text as necessary.
3. Instead of letting users with 10k+ reputation see spam/offensive flags, grant them expanded moderation capabilities. There are a lot of forms which this could take -- I seem to recall previous discussion on this very Meta about "chat moderators", but this is the thing I'm the least sure about the specifics of.

There are, of course, other things I'd like to see in Chat (a real bot API comes to mind, because the alternative is stuff like this), but moderation is core to keeping the platform alive and pleasant for all to use. Let's start there.

If you don’t use Chat, or if your usage has declined, what are the reasons for that?

• Difficult to retrieve information from past chats (hard to find).
• Lower content quality compared to the regular Q&A (e.g., users can't edit incorrect messages, downvote BS or conversely, upvote good content).
• Too chatty: I only want answers to my questions, nothing else.
• No chat data dump.
• Fewer formatting options.
• Interleaved threads making it a mess to follow.

The only potential upsides of the chat are socializing with other SE users (which I am not interested but I understand this is one way to increase retention to avoid people keep flocking to AI solutions) and discussing matters that aren't Q&A (which happened for ~0.1% of my use of SE so far, only discussing about the SE platform or moderation so far).

Yet another TNBer here (although I've been on langdev for longer.)

How did you first discover Chat and what were some of your early experiences?

I actually first discovered chat through SOCVR while trying my hand at flagging and cleaning up some things, but I left it for a while, and returned mostly while langdev was in private beta, so I'm going to say my early experiences were during that time. I mostly used it to, well, chat with the other people during the site takeoff and discuss things related to langdev - like on-topicness and the like - and just hang out.

How are you currently using Chat? Please share specific examples of what you use it for and why.

I'm currently an RO of both The Garbage Collector (langdev's main room) and TNB, so I do the regular RO tasks and stuff there, but mostly I chat about the various topics and occasionally ask for help with things code golf related.

What are the biggest challenges or frustrations you face when using Chat? How do they affect your experience?

As a regular user problem, I use a tablet a lot for chat, and it's painful to switch between phone-ish mode and desktop mode when I need to. Another thing I find annoying is the two minute edit timer - sometimes I start editing something, rethink, and it times out before I can edit. Besides that, more RO powers would be nice - especially for rep-poor users (like me, heh heh), I can't really do anything useful except move messages. Maybe RO granting the ability to review chat flags regardless of reputation?

Imagine if new users were more aware of Chat in the future. What would you ideally want them to use it for? What wouldn’t you want them to use it for? What guardrails would be needed?

Just hanging out and talking, honestly! TNB's very active with all sorts of conversations, most of them interesting and cool, but TGC typically doesn't get a lot of traffic - admittedly, we're a much smaller site, but it still isn't as active as it was during private beta even with less users. Given the questions on the front page could sometimes be improved, it would be great if question askers could come and seek feedback.