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According to Moderator moves comments to chat - can low-rep user participate?, low rep users are allowed to chat when a discussion is moved to a chat room by a moderator, but not when the chat room is created by someone else.

What about allowing high SME (gold tag-badge holders or >10k users in large sites >5k users on small sites) to automatically "invite" to chat new users / low rep users that have been participating in a post discussion? If so, should this be allowed only on OP's first question or is it something that makes sense to be allowed on any question?

There are several older related :

At least one of the above posts and other related ones (i.e. allow guests / users without SE accounts, bring chat to 21st century) are included in Magic wand time - what does your community need? from 2021.

Feature requests form Meta Stack Overflow

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  • Does the ability for sub-20 users to be allowed to chat exist in the existing chat interface? I think something like that was possible for a mentoring test a while back,
    – Kevin B
    Commented Oct 21, 2022 at 18:45
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    Or we could redesign the comment system so comments don't need to get shuffled into chat room purgatory. We could have a page separate from the questions and answers for discussion and promote valuable comments from the discussion so they appear under the posts. The current system is backward -- having to move/delete everything that isn't valuable takes to much focus and causes a lot of angst. The current system also incentivizes writing answers in comments instead of as proper answers.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Oct 21, 2022 at 18:57
  • @KevinB Yes, already exists but it's limited to chat rooms created when a mod moves comments
    – Rubén
    Commented Oct 21, 2022 at 19:24

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Considering that low rep users are allowed to comment only on their own questions, I think that it makes sense to add this feature to any post.

On and ideal world good enough new users will not stay with rep <20 after a couple of posts but I have seen several cases in Stack Overflow where users have 5 or more posts, not being banned, so it's fair to assume that their posts are not very low quality / are good enough to be keep, at least for a while.

Several of them have gained some rep by accepting answers so it looks that they are understanding a bit about how the Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange model work. When reviewing their previous posts sometimes they got code only answers with no explanation and some of the newer questions are follow-up questions about new issues derived from those answers, some time misguiding the OP. On few of these cases I posted an answer and closed as duplicate (duphammer) one of the follow-up questions. Being able to invite the OP to chat might help to save a lot of time and will keep the visible comments minimal.

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