Streamline moderators contacting users through chat

Question

If a moderator needs to contact a user (and it's not severe enough to warrant a moderator message), it's common to make a private room and ping them. The procedure is:

1. Create a new chatroom (named "Room for UserA and UserB")
2. Superping the user with some stub message so a chat account is created for them
3. Find the user's chat account through the 'control access' menu of the chat room.
4. Add them to the room's write ACL
5. Make the room private
6. Post the actual message

This takes more time than it looks like. Is it possible to add something to the chat room creation page that takes a chat ID or site+UID (same as the superping dialog) and automatically does all that?

Answer 1

I agree that it should be significantly easier for moderators to create a chat with a specific user. I've gone ahead and written this up internally and thrown it into the backlog to be reviewed and possibly implemented. Once the team reviews it, then it will either move to the devs or be kicked to a later date.

I'll put a status-deferred on this for the time being, and hopefully this will come to fruition soon.

Answer 2

I would propose a link on the mod menu for a user

(super sensitive mod options, like merge, removed!)

That does the following things:

1. Creates the chat room "Private chat with user Foo" if it doesn't automatically exist
2. Gives Foo write access
3. Opens that chat room in a new tab
4. Automatically places a link in Foo's inbox telling him that he should join that chat room

This would turn a ten step process into a one step, and would also allow mods to forego leaving comments to reply to flags or other concerns.

Do this. I say so.

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I will tineye that bastard, so don't cheat.

Answer 3

I'm not sure that this would even be limited to moderators. Giving users the ability to create chat rooms easily from questions or answers and perhaps automatically generating comments directing users to those rooms might be a good idea, as well. I think that Chat is underutilized, and streamlining the process of creating chat rooms for extended discussion would be awesome.