Require two clicks to join a chatroom

Question

There are two camps with very different positions regarding how users should be treated when they join a chat room:

1. If you join a chat room, you've signed on to be addressed by random people and bots. It's expected that you may be pinged by anyone or anything.
2. If you join a chat room, you're lurking. Until you talk, you've only dipped your toes into the water.

I'm in camp #2, and the main reason is that joining a chat room is very lightweight. It happens as soon as you click the big link in the room description. I'm not too happy that (provided that you're logged into chat and have enough reputation to talk) clicking the big link makes you appear in a very visible manner into the list of participants in the room.

I wouldn't mind as much if joining a chat room was truly an active decision, if it wasn't something that happened as soon as you wanted to have a look. (Yes, there's a link to the transcript, but it's rather small and hidden.)

Changing the main link to the transcript would solve the problem — browsing the transcript is discreet. However, I don't think this is an acceptable solution, because it would make actually joining the room — a common action — too much work.

What I propose instead is the following:

• When you click on the main link in a room description, the display is similar to what it is now when you don't have the reputation to participate in the room (or aren't logged in at all). You get to see messages appearing in real time, and the screen layout is the same as if you were in the room.
• The bottom part of the screen should show a message like “click here to participate” (I'm not hung on the wording). If you click, you get to join the room, with your avatar appearing in the participant list. If you start typing, then “send” button and the other buttons appear, and posting a message also joins the room.
• If you've talked in a room recently, clicking on the main link for that room directly makes you an active participant.

The first click is merely clicking on a link whose text is the room name, which doesn't hint that this is an active, public action, so it doesn't have any effect that's visible to other people. The second click clearly tells the user that he's about to participate, and participating in a chat is by definition public since others may talk to you.

This provides a lightweight way to make joining a chatroom less accidental than it is now. It solves the problem of users being jumped on as soon as they click the link to a chat room: now they won't be jumped on until they deliberately jump in.

Answer 1

This sounds like an acceptable solution to what greeting solves for us with the bot right now.

Greeting (and pretty much every other bot feature) is the result of shimming things SE staff has not implemented.

If you could show users a few messages and maybe a line indicating a welcome message. That'd totally solve it for us. That's give a native way to implement the greet feature.

What about something like this?

^{good luck getting SE to implement it though.. chat feature requests are often ignored.}

Answer 2

Note: This is a mockup, for those who are having trouble understanding with text, according to my best understanding of what the proposal is.

Current Setup

If you go to the chat main page you will get a bunch of rooms that look like this:

If you click on the room name, you are automatically joined in to the room as a user:

If you click on the circled number in the bottom left of the chat screen, you get the transcript without joining (this is difficult to find for your average user).

Proposed Setup

When you click on the room name, rather than immediately joining you get to browse the contents but do not instantly join. Instead you get the standard window with the chat box below looking something like this:

Buttons are greyed out, comment clearly stating that if you click here, you will join and can be pinged.

You can browse messages, and to join all you need to do is click in the chat box. The only added effort it takes over the current system is that the chat box does not start active. If you click in the box, the buttons turn back to orange, and you get the default behavior again:

Answer 3

Studies have shown that adding even two clicks to a process like this one reduces the number of participants by 80%.

I love the chat rooms, I'd like to make it as easy as possible to join. My vote's to keep it the way it is.

Answer 4

The way to lurk — that is, read but not join — is to read the transcript. When browsing the transcript in the full-site view, the first button under the room description is "join N users in this room now", which provides both clear instruction and a hint about how active the room is right now. I think going through the transcript would be pretty straightforward if we made it more obvious.

Fairly often I want to check out a chat room — usually one that comments were moved into — but I don't want to join it. I have to copy the URL, edit it to go to the transcript, and then go to the page. Editing URLs is so 2010; we can do better. Let's make links to chat rooms always go to the transcript first, and if necessary, provide extra guidance for first-time or low-rep chat users.

This does mean an extra click for those of us who want to just jump into our usual rooms. One mitigation here is the "join favorite rooms" button, which is (and should remain) an actual join. We could also, in the room list, replace the obscure path to the transcript with a (less-obscure?) path to the live room. Basically, I'm suggesting we flip the default — going to a room means viewing the transcript, and we can allow experienced users to bypass that if they want.

What we shouldn't do is change the behavior based on how recently the user was in the room. If you use a lot of rooms, that would seem very inconsistent — why did I get the live room here but the transcript there? And it turns out that I was in this room two days ago and that one three days ago? That would be confusing.

Answer 5

Instead of introducing a medium weight feature, why not just make the existing feature more noticeable? I doubt many users understand what the message count really means in the bottom right corner.

Moreover, I sincerely doubt inexperienced users know you can view the current transcript starting from that minute by clicking that link

There is even the option to join the room while looking at the transcript.

What I am getting at is, lets make those numbers have a word there. Using preview would get the point across. This will require two things.

1. Change the width of .room-message-count from 35px to 40px.
2. Change the text of the link to preview. The title can remain to show the all time messages on hover.