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Possible Duplicate:
Don’t freeze a chatroom soon after a mod has unfrozen it

Stack Exchange's chat has a cool* feature where rooms are automatically frozen for inactivity after like a couple weeks or something. It's great for auto-freezing the "room for X and Y" auto-generated chatrooms. But it's also the bane of certain specialist chat rooms that are important but rarely used. Moderator only chat rooms (UX's hasn't been used in a year) and blog rooms often get deleted and have to be repeatedly unfrozen.

In addition, unfreezing does nothing to stop future auto-freezes. In fact it doesn't even reset the timer it seems, if I don't add a message the bot seems to freeze the chat again the next day, leaving to a time honored tradition of me verbally abusing the chat bot after unfreezing the room to reset the timer:

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I suggest that there should be some way to block future freezes. These anti-frozen rooms could still be cleared up manually by moderators as-needed, but the current situation has lead to me personally undeleting at least 4 different sites' Blog chat rooms (usually as a response to a "WTF happened to our blog room?" mod flag in chat). If it's mod-only and reversible by mods it seems the potential for abuse is extremely low and it would save a lot of annoyance. Blog rooms in particular often have dry spells without actually being of no use.

Freeze-locked rooms should also be immune to the auto-delete script which purges inactive rooms too (I don't know if this is tied to freezing directly, but it always happens eventually after a freeze as well)

*: this is both a pun and sarcasm

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  • 6
    Did you ever get a reply from @StackExchange?
    – casperOne
    Jan 26, 2013 at 23:10
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    @casperOne he said it's a "chiseled jaw" but I stand by my initial assessment
    – Ben Brocka
    Jan 26, 2013 at 23:11
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    What's even the point of freezing in the first place? Was there actually any necromancy abuse going on that caused freezing to be added?
    – Pubby
    Jan 26, 2013 at 23:17
  • @Pubby some chatrooms really do fall into disuse and need to go away (like the auto-generated ones I mention). I guess freezing is done before deleting as some sort of warning/more gentle disappearance before deleting. Either way, necroing shouldn't be required for some things
    – Ben Brocka
    Jan 26, 2013 at 23:25
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    While I sort of agree with the premise of the suggested duplicate I don't think they're duplicates. The suggested dupe doesn't have all that good of justification and suggests a much different method (auto-lengthen the timeout when unfreezing rooms) rather than an explicit "don't freeze this" option as suggested here
    – Ben Brocka
    Jan 27, 2013 at 3:13
  • @Ben: you should probably address the answer to that one here then. FWIW, this is a non-issue for mod rooms.
    – Shog9
    Jan 27, 2013 at 3:49
  • @Pubby: "necromancy" isn't even abuse
    – endolith
    Dec 2, 2013 at 16:31
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    @Pubby frozen rooms don't show up on the main list of a site's chat rooms, so it's a way to clear out all the obsolete "Discussion between X and Y" rooms that aren't going to be used again. Frozen rooms are not automatically deleted, though rooms with only a few messages are.
    – Monica Cellio
    May 4, 2015 at 1:00

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