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Most of the users I answer questions to are fairly new to the system.

That means they have a low reputation (often lower than 15) on SO.
You can guess their reputation on MSO... They usually don't know Meta.

Yet, they are the ones who would most benefit from a quick chat to clarify their questions and validate some possible solutions (like in this SO question)

Would you consider the (future) possibility to allow a legitimate chat user (more than 20 rep on MSO) to invite that new user to a specific room dedicated to the OP question?

In other words, that user would not be able to connect to the chat unless invited.
Once connected, he/she wouldn't be able to join other rooms/create other rooms (or even see those rooms for that matter).

He/she would only be able to join/leave the specific room created by the legitimate chat user for the sole purpose of a "live support session" for a specific SO question.

(the all process could be automated, allowing for each user answering a question to invite the OP to a specific chat session, in a room automatically created for said question, and which would be removed after a day or so of inactivity.
Those "rooms" would need a separate space in order to not pollute the usual "social" rooms)

The alternative right now would be to:

  • ask them to create real quick an MSO account
  • post two (intelligent) answers
  • wait for me to upvote them (which is abusing the system)

Not exactly ideal.

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  • Was this feature dropped with the merged chat?
    – Zoredache
    Commented Feb 24, 2011 at 19:29
  • Be nice if you could attach a chat conversation to a question.. otherwise all the good conversation would be lost. Commented Aug 30, 2011 at 21:05
  • 1
    meta.stackexchange.com/questions/82738/…
    – balpha StaffMod
    Commented Nov 29, 2011 at 9:52

1 Answer 1

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Edit:

Note that the technique described here no longer appears in the FAQ, and no longer seems to work.

Pre-edit:

The current chat.stackoverflow FAQ mentions:

How can I discuss a particular question?

If you want to discuss a certain question that has been posted on Stack Overflow, you can create a room for it.

To do so, just prepend "chat." to the question link.

For example, if you want to chat about How big is an integer? ("How big is an integer?"), visit https://chat.stackoverflow.com/questions/3940253.
If there is an existing room for this question, you will enter it immediately.
Otherwise, a new room will be created with you as the owner.

That looks like a good start, but I am not sure if a new SO user (with less than 10 rep) will be able to join a dedicated room that I will have created.
So the "invitation" feature might still be needed in that case.

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  • 1
    I'm not seeing this feature anymore. I also tried it, and it didn't work. What's my alternative? Spam comments until the link is auto-created (yes this isn't a real alternative)? Commented Aug 30, 2011 at 20:15
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    @Merlyn: agreed, this must be why the question has still a status-planned tag attached to it.
    – VonC
    Commented Aug 30, 2011 at 20:23
  • @Merlyn -- see my post: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/98926/… which was shot down... (well at least at the moment it is)
    – Naftali
    Commented Aug 30, 2011 at 21:22

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