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Stack Exchange sites can get closed if the become inactive.. The site contents are removed and are available only as data dumps.
However, chat rooms have a more liberal retention policy: they are kept permanently if they got at least 15 messages by 2 users.
So what happens to chat rooms associated with sites that get deleted? I think each chat room has to have a parent site, but these rooms' parent sites will cease to exist.
Let's looks at some of these chat rooms .
Rooms seem to have been deleted according to the normal rules, but for some reason many have remained open instead of being frozen.
Apparently the rooms are still associated with the domains of the closed sites; each page's source includes information about the room in JSON like this:
{
id: 1570,
host: 'healthcareit.stackexchange.com',
deleted: true,
frozen: false
}
Chat rooms are kept, as they are linked to the stack exchange chat, and not the general website. Great example being the firearms chat. This is still open, and it's parent site is listed as firearms.stackexchange.net. This however redirects to the dead Area51 Proposal.
They must still stay within the requirements listed in the original question to be kept however.
host: 'firearms.stackexchange.com'