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When a moderator moves a set of comments to chat for moderator reasons this is displayed as the only comment in their place:

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

Which is fine, I have no issue with the text itself. What bothers me is that moved to chat is a link to the chat room.

When you click the link it automatically joins you into the room. If you close the tab it will not automatically remove you from chat if you are in other rooms at the same time.

I think instead of having it take you to exchange/room/someNumber/discussion-on-question-title it should take you to exchange/transcript/someNumber/discussion-on-question-title so that you can look at what was said without actually joining the room. There is still a link in the transcript if joining the room is something that seems worthwhile.

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  • 1
    You can click 'leave'
    – Frank
    Jan 16, 2015 at 1:15
  • 1
    @Frank - True. However, sometimes the discussion is rather involved and ongoing and at those times I would also prefer not to have my icon float in with the impression that I intend to join in.
    – Travis J
    Jan 16, 2015 at 18:50
  • I wouldn't have that impression, @Travis, I would think that you had clicked on the link and was possibly interested in seeing how the conversation was going.
    – Frank
    Jan 16, 2015 at 20:45
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    @Frank - How would you know if it were heated or interesting though? All you see for context is the single link. For all you know you could be walking in to some sort of flame war or intense disagreement. Further, if the conversation happened at some time in the past, there is no point in joining if you wish to review the conversation. It is very rare for a discussion moved to chat to actually have content added to it afterwards by anyone except the parties involved at the point it was moved.
    – Travis J
    Jan 16, 2015 at 21:27
  • Still, floating in on a heated discussion doesn't give me the impression of wanting to join in, at all. Also, I see no reason not to join an old room when viewing the conversation. You can always leave when you're done and ready to move on. Not a hassle at all for me.
    – Frank
    Jan 16, 2015 at 21:30
  • @Frank - There is no reason to join the room because you are not going to talk. It wastes time loading, it wastes time waiting for it to unload when you click leave. Best case scenario your time is wasted. Beyond that you may have to deal with entering a room which is going through some heated back and forth (or worse). It is fine if you are okay with having your time wasted, but in general that is not desirable.
    – Travis J
    Jan 16, 2015 at 21:42
  • Not any slower to load than the transcript, for me. No time wasted here
    – Frank
    Jan 16, 2015 at 21:49
  • @Frank - It takes roughly 5 seconds to load into a room. There is even a loading modal which indicates the load is taking place. Until the entire room is loaded, leave cannot be selected. Once the entire room has loaded, leave can be selected, at which point you are returned to the all rooms page. Clicking on the transcript loads in approximately 350 milliseconds.
    – Travis J
    Jan 16, 2015 at 21:51
  • Both take less than a second for me.
    – Frank
    Jan 16, 2015 at 21:59
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    Let us continue this discussion in chat.
    – Travis J
    Jan 16, 2015 at 22:00
  • While my previous message was to Frank, and moving a conversation to chat is different than the topic at hand (although slightly ironic), would you as a user rather join that discussion, or view it? While the creation makes much more sense to join from the participants standpoint, the contrast is still topical.
    – Travis J
    Jan 16, 2015 at 22:19
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    +1 If a new user doesn't know their way around chat well enough to navigate between the transcript and the room, perhaps they would benefit from looking around a bit before talking anyway. But a new name on a room list (particularly if it's in blue) can have unintended consequences.
    – Jolenealaska
    Aug 20, 2017 at 22:30
  • The 'continue this discussion in chat' link is HTTP, not HTTPS; this probably holds for the 'moved to chat' link as well. I've mentioned it here, I hope they'll implement this feature request at the same time.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Aug 21, 2017 at 9:50
  • Yeah, one of the most common reasons for moving comments to chat is that they're going off the rails in some way. The last thing they need is more people obviously coming in, possibly making everyone feel even more under scrutiny.
    – Cascabel
    Oct 24, 2017 at 1:30

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This probably doesn't help too many people, but I wrote a little userscript. It will change any links that are visible when the page is loaded. So any comments that you have to click on a link to see won't have the links changed. That's because I couldn't figure out the onchange elements in JS.

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Make all chat links transcript links
// @version      0.1
// @description  It turns any chat link that is loaded without clicking anything into a chat transcript link.
// @author       thesecretmaster
// @match        https://*.stackexchange.com/*
// @exclude      https://chat.stackexchange.com/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

window.onload = (function() {
    'use strict';

    var links = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
    for (var i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
        links[i].href = links[i].href.replace("/rooms/", "/transcript/");
    }
})();
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3
  • Unfortunately, this forces all voting buttons to reload the page whenever they are clicked, which in turn causes a race that usually (but not always) makes them ineffective.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Aug 22, 2017 at 3:31
  • @NathanTuggy I'm not sure I see the issue you're pointing out. It works fine for me. Why would it do that? It just runs a kind of find+replace when the page loads.
    – thesecretmaster
    Aug 22, 2017 at 10:16
  • The replace call turns blank hrefs into links to the page itself, minus any anchors. Running on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:45.9) Gecko/20100101 Goanna/3.2 Firefox/45.9 PaleMoon/27.4.1.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Aug 22, 2017 at 15:39

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