Demystifying chat reputation requirements

Question

How much reputation do you need to participate in chat?

It's an easy answer, right? You need at least 20 reputation to participate in chat. /privileges/chat even tells us so.

But for which chat site(s) is that?

Because we have at least three chat domains:

• StackOverflow chat
• StackExchange chat
• Meta StackExchange chat

And the chat FAQs (See: 1 2 ) don't make it clear which site you need to have that precious 20 reps from in order to participate.

The confusion is compounded by support requests like this one where the user had enough reputation but couldn't access chat, and this one where the user gamed their general StackExchange rep and could participate in chat.

And all the above is made a little bit more unclear because once you earn the association bonus then you can just register with the associated site and this is no longer an issue.

So what's the correct answer for how much reputation and where does it need to be from in order to chat?"

Is the correct answer "You need to have at least 20 reputation on a site in the domain that the room belongs to in order to chat in that particular room?" And if that is correct, is that for all chat rooms within a given domain or is there an additional per room check tying back to the owning site of the room?

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Wait, what?! Who cares?
Well, it's easy to shrug this off once you've earned 200 rep. However, when you're trying to provide guidance to other users about inviting them into chat, it's important to know just how much reputation and from where a new user needs to have in order to participate in chat.

Sidenote: This question is closely related as it explains what additional privileges you get in chat with increased reputation or room ownership. But it doesn't address where the precious reputation needs to be earned.

Also related: It appears that StackOverflow Portuguese chat sites and StackOverflow Russian chat sites use the StackExchange chat domain.

Answer 1

Note: This is a suggested answer based upon some research I've done. It really ought to be confirmed by an SE Community Manager or SE dev.

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Using the information provided in this chat history¹ attributed to this sketchy community member, these appear to be the rules.

1. Meta StackExchange (MSE) and StackOverflow chats are separate and require a user to have 20 rep on the respective site (MSE or SO) in order to participate in chat.

   • So you have to have a MSE profile with at least 20 rep to participate in MSE chat.
   • Likewise, you have to have a SO profile with 20 rep for SO chat.
   • MSE rep doesn't count for SO chat and SO rep doesn't count for MSE chat.
   • Other SE site rep doesn't count for either MSE or SO chat.

2. Chatting in StackExchange chat is a bit easier. You need at least one of the following:

   • 20 rep on MSE
   • 20 rep on SO
   • 20 rep on any other SE site
   • combined 20 rep on all SE sites together, however only reputation you actually earned on each site, i.e. the default 1 reputation point is not counted towards that.²

¹ _{Hat tip to Lamart for pointing me in the right direction}
² _{There was a bug that got squashed back in 2018.}