When comments get too chatty the move-to-chat feature asks if you'd like to move it out. But this often happens after the fact and thus doesn't prevent it.
I propose that:
There is merit in this feature request. At least for Q&A based tech-support sites like Ask Ubuntu and Ask Different, where more often than not, we get troubleshooting type of questions. Because of the nature of the target audience, we assume that the user has none to limited knowledge.
Given this context, if a new user posts a question that requires a bit of to-and-fro communication, the comments aren't really effective in solving the problem. And some of us think that the troubleshooting issues can be better handled if we could immediately bring users into chat.
While chat requires a minimum 20 rep to use, I do realize that if you were to grant explicit write access to the user, we can sort that part out.
But, for that to happen rather seamlessly, having a button in the question that invites the user as well as provides explicit write access by a click of a button would be rather handy.
easy button I can push to request to move to chat. I had hoped that by now there would be.
Commented
May 12, 2012 at 2:48
Yes, there should be a discreet button to use at will to invite commentors to a chat.
The current heuristic often fails to intervene until after it's:
I find I simply ignore the popup most of the time, since by the time it shows up, I'm done. It comes too late to serve as a reminder to avoid back-and-forth commenting, and often it only shows up when nothing more needs to be said.
A discreet button would serve as both reminder to avoid discussion in comments and as call-to-action to the alternative. Not to mention, automating the option earlier would make it more frequently chosen earlier — currently it can be done manually, but that is a high-barrier multi-step option that is not often remembered let alone chosen, compared to the low barrier of "just squeeze in one more comment."
I wanted to propose it myself and I am glad that the question is being discussed already. I would like to add also that a possibility to say something "not to everybody" will solve the so long discussed problem of "excessive" thanks.
There is one more problem that will be solved this way: When a discussion appears not between 2, but among 3 people, and has many pure discussion messages, the existing automatics still will never propose to go into the chat mode.
As for the argument that we don't want people to send their unwanted messages to smb, here we are NOT talking about that.
Yes, it should. This would particularly solve problems with sites like parenting, where soapboxing is common and we occasionally end up with very BAD advice given in comments where it can't be downvoted.
Yes it should. I thought this was already a feature and wanted to do so today. I was just surprised that it is not.
In a bunch of (marked duplicate) questions/answers/comments about this, I keep seeing responses like "This is a great future feature" and then comments such as "Responding 4 years later... is the future here yet?" So here I am even years later after those types of comments; what about now??? We are now, what, 7 years after this was first mentioned by the first question asking for this? Is it going to take a decade?
I am having a conversation that should not continue in comments and could get lengthy and "debaty". I just wanted to continue it offline from the comment area.
Back when this question was asked it was a bigger change. Later some of the underlying tooling changed and I asked this similar question (2016) (which was, in turn, a refinement of a proposal from 2013). I don't think that question is a dupe of this question because the answers here don't take into account the approach I proposed there, which is:
Let's allow users at some moderately-low reputation level (1000?) to push a button that:
- creates a chat room
- grants access to that room to the post's author and everybody who's commented so far
- copies all comments to the room
- creates a comment on the post linking to the room
Now that moderators can move comments to chat (they couldn't when you asked this question), we're most of the way there. I see two remaining pieces of work:
Create a user interface to trigger it. Maybe we add a "start a chat" link next to "add comment", which is replaced with a link saying something like (e.g.) "visit chat room (47 messages, last update 12 min ago)" after somebody does that. Maybe there's a better UI.
Decide how this feature interacts with the mod move. This is a problem with the two-users-chatting scenario now, too, but allowing users to proactively create chat rooms could increase the problem of forked conversations. (See the linked post for more on this.)
I wish to voice my support for this suggestion. I ranted about the problem separately months ago, noting how many years it has been, and there has unsurprisingly been no action in those months either. It boggles my mind that the software doesn't make it easier to take discussions to chat while simultaneously seeing fit to scold people for not doing so. This is atrocious UI. Why even create a chat feature if you're going to treat it like this?
Sometimes in less popular SE or in technical related SE that requires more input from the OP there is only one person that comments and he/she is the only one that might answer the question, and in the comment section, it's just a discussion between the OP and the person that wants to answer which get's lengthy until finally after 7 comments it shows the:
Let us continue this discussion in chat.
It seems that since this question was first asked in 2011, there is a new (marked duplicate) questions/answers/comments about this, so I hope that we look at this once again.
No. It shouldn't be too easy to direct the conversation into a chat too early, because valuable arguments to the questions could be hidden in a separate chat. Most of the time it is preferable to have all related discussions in one place (the comments to the question).
And if it's really needed, there is a button at the bottom to create a new chat already.
