We recently had our main chat room frozen on the DIY site because we're not that talkative. I'd suggest a feature to allow moderators to explicitly protect chatrooms that would exclude them from these automatic freezing and deletion routines so that discussions appropriate for this forum have a place to go.
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7Note Drupal.SE also had their main chat room frozen recently as well, so it's not just a problem isolated to DIY.– user149432Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 13:54
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2The "main" chat rooms are actually just a normal chat room that people have created and then decided is the main one, the system doesn't have any concept of a "main" room, so they receive no special treatment. To complete your request, either that needs changing or mods need to be given a way to "protect" arbitrary rooms from automatic shutdown. But, personally, I'm not entirely convinced this is necessary - if a main room sees no activity at all for 14 days then it's not really much of a main room, is it?– DMA57361Commented Aug 1, 2011 at 14:41
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8@DMA57361, on low volume sites, there aren't any other rooms either, which limits chatting to only people with 100 rep. Allowing mods to make a protected room sounds like a good solution. Maybe sort those up top as the primary rooms for a site.– BMitchCommented Aug 1, 2011 at 15:58
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2Same thing happened on DSP.SE. chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1090/signal-processing meta.dsp.stackexchange.com/a/1232/29 chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/9727/uhh General discussion chat room should never be frozen.– endolithCommented Jul 24, 2013 at 19:10
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Count Code Golf in. Frozen/unfrozen several times.– Johannes KuhnCommented Dec 3, 2013 at 12:47
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4Perhaps limit it so that each site must have at least one chat room that isn't frozen?– Once Upon a DevCommented Dec 3, 2013 at 13:26
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4@3ventic when I've seen that suggestion, the criteria was the last active room would not be frozen. This makes a situation where a new room started for a specific topic would get considered active and instantly freeze the main room if the main room hasn't been used in a while. IMO, protecting a room should be a mod feature so that one or more rooms per site can be designated as always available. E.g. some sites have rooms specifically to contact the mods that are relatively unused but should never be frozen due to their purpose.– BMitchCommented Dec 3, 2013 at 13:58
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1Same with Ask Different, a side chat took over for main chat. We typically get very busy when Apple announces items and then chat is idle until some topic arises for the community to discuss.– bmikeCommented Aug 20 at 12:59
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2 Answers
This problem exists in 2024 and there is a proposal to change this on the moderator team site.
I would like to propose publicly the same change to implement the following logic:
- make a table (or column - I’m not a good DBA) with a flag indicating a chat room should be excluded from robot automated freeze due to activity
- Change the robot freeze code to check this value before issuing a freeze
- Allow moderators to nominate rooms on their site (typically the main moderator chat and the main site public chat) to be added manually to this table by the site developers. (This could be as simple as a post on the site meta).
Anything else the developers come up with would be a bonus, but this would allow each site to designate a couple rooms to never be hidden or frozen.
Making humans routinely reverse a robot that can’t tell which rooms are significant for a community is poor design. I appreciate most ephemeral rooms should get frozen, but to lose visibility of the main mod chat and the main site chat since people don’t post every week is shortsighted.
Each site should have a permanently-open general discussion room, and a user-generated room about a specific topic should never be able to take over from it. – endolith Commented Dec 2, 2013 at 20:58
Special purpose rooms (Chat Feedback was a good example of this, before it was consolidated) may not get continual traffic, but their being unfrozen when (non-mod) people do need them is rather important. – Tim Stone Commented Apr 27, 2012 at 9:41
Basically, I’m asking to never hide (freeze) the mod chat room from site moderators and never hide (freeze) the main chat room from anyone.
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1It doesn't really matter if the moderator room for a site gets frozen or deleted. Moderators can talk in frozen and deleted rooms. In fact, from the chat room page, it's only noticeable that the room is frozen or deleted by seeing the message(s) posted by the Feeds user saying it was frozen/deleted, or in the room popup (which has controls to freeze/unfreeze and delete/undelete). I'm not objecting to the feature, but it just doesn't matter for moderator rooms, and that doesn't take into account that moderators can unfreeze/undelete the room any time they want.– MakyenCommented Aug 20 at 12:51
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It’s about visibility @Makyen let me bring forward another answer where I hopefully made this clear.– bmikeCommented Aug 20 at 12:52
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2Thanks for reading @Makyen Does my edit make my request more coherent? As a mod, I know I can post in frozen rooms, but the site hides them from us when they’re frozen. I often scan the rooms and if our mod chat gets a post while frozen it’s not visible. The big problem is when a random side chat is more active than the main room and now the whole site can’t find the main chat room until we take action.– bmikeCommented Aug 20 at 12:56
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Frozen and deleted rooms are visible to moderators in the rooms list and show up in each room's sidebar under "other rooms you're in", if you're in the room (just like unfrozen and undeleted rooms). Admittedly, showing them in the rooms list does require clicking on the "show frozen/deleted rooms" button that's on each tab of the rooms list pages. That's a persistent selection that can be separately selected for each tab of the rooms list. It's fairly easy to favorite the mod room and have that selection active for the "favorite" tab.– MakyenCommented Aug 20 at 13:11
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1@Makyen it kind of matter, but this affects for any chat room: Feeds don't work on frozen room. Commented Oct 9 at 10:23
This is now implemented. Main chat rooms do not freeze automatically due to inactivity. I checked various chat rooms like Project Management, main chat room for Project Management and "Bar Sport", main chat room of Italian Language. Both the rooms are not frozen in spite of inactivity.
In PM Stack Exchange chat room, last message was posted 638 days ago before I posted a recent test message. In "Bar Sport", there are no feeds. But messages posted by feeds do not count as messages. Other chat rooms freeze even if there are feeds posting in chat room.
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This applies to meta sites' chat rooms too, right?– user392547Commented Nov 26, 2018 at 6:06
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@Chair Yes. Rooms where there is no activity except feeds freeze. Commented Nov 26, 2018 at 7:51
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2Not sure it's about main rooms, more likely that if there is only one single room for a site, it won't auto freeze. Unless you have proof that's not the case? Commented Nov 26, 2018 at 8:23
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1@ShadowWizard Most likely, the room which was created by system is the room which doesn't freeze. Commented Nov 26, 2018 at 9:42
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2Hmm... pretty sure that I saw something about single room not being frozen too even if not the original main room. (i.e. main room can get deleted, it happened on arqade I think) Commented Nov 26, 2018 at 9:46
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1@shadow Probably here "We do try to keep at least one room open per site, but it looks like some 1:1 rooms (question-related rooms between a few users) were taking precedence." diy.meta.stackexchange.com/a/351 Commented Nov 26, 2018 at 9:48
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4Actually, the "last standing" chat room is the one that won't be frozen, regardless if it's "main" chat room or not. CS50's "main" chat room is frozen because there were newer active chat rooms, until someone deleted the last one, and now the site doesn't have any open chat room... Commented Feb 10, 2019 at 0:48
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2To demonstrate that Bookends is correct and this answer is wrong, I dropped by Open Data site and created a room: soon thereafter, their main room was frozen for inactivity. (Oops)– user302202Commented Feb 10, 2019 at 0:53
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@Bookends Ok. I think the mechanism has changed after this answer is posted. When i posted this answer, I checked in multiple rooms. If you check cliffb chat room, it has not frozen for 6 months even there is no message. So, the main room is still an exception from automatic deletion. (btw, cs50 Site doesn't have a chat room? Is that fine). Commented Feb 10, 2019 at 2:22
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1@NogShine based on the FAQ, a room will be either deleted or frozen, and most "main" chat rooms have passed the retention threshold, so they won't be deleted and only will be frozen forever. Also, I believe "main" chat room can be deleted automatically if no one participates and another chat room is created. IMHO, it's probably easier to think that actually there is no concept of "main" chat room; every chat room is subjected to the same rules. Commented Feb 10, 2019 at 2:40
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What happens to the chat link on SE log dropdown the if the "main" chat room is deleted?– RubénCommented Feb 10, 2019 at 2:53
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2@Rubén it still goes to the chat room page filtered to that particular site, but empty just like CS50.SE chat room Commented Feb 10, 2019 at 12:27
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10This answer is wrong. There is no concept of “main chatroom”. What happens is that the last active chatroom of a site will not freeze, but it could be any room, e.g. a room automatically created by “move comments to chat”. I'm not aware that anything has changed since balpha's answer and your observations don't contradict that. Commented Mar 24, 2019 at 9:56