Counter-proposal: make [chat] link to the list of all SITE rooms rather than ALL rooms.
I can see the positives of giving people:
- a choice of different rooms, for sites which have multiple associated rooms (such as mine, Science Fiction & Fantasy)
- the ability to inspect a room first rather than jumping straight into chat, where their presence will immediately be visible to a bunch of strangers.
For these reasons, a list of rooms might be considered preferable to a direct link into a particular room. Also, is there always a single 'main' chatroom for a given site? On Puzzling, for example, the chatroom which was originally set up to be the 'main' room has hardly any activity nowadays and has been upstaged by a second chatroom which is much more active. Linking to the list of site rooms rather than the list of all rooms would almost certainly be an easier change to implement, since it doesn't require keeping a systematic record of which the 'main' room is for each site.
On the other hand, the current system is bad: if you're a new user who's not familiar with SE and you get linked to a list of all chatrooms, how are you going to be able to tell which one to use? That's going to lead to a higher probability of people coming into a random room and saying something off-topic, which can cause problems, or of people simply not knowing where to go and abandoning the whole idea of chat. The fact that [chat] links to the list of all rooms has long been a pet peeve of mine.
