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I've moved a few comment chains to chat, and assuming I would be notified of replies, closed the chat windows (btw if anyone could point me to some information about how chat notifications work, that'd be great). I just remembered about those chat rooms and would like to check them for replies, but I can't find a list of rooms I've participated in previously.

So how would I find the chat rooms I've been active in previously?

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You have a chat account on a chat server. In the network, there are 3 servers:

Each chat server has their own collection of user accounts, you don't necessarily have an account on all three. To find rooms you've participated in, visit all three servers (or at least verify you picked the right one).

From the topbar you can open the site navigator and then find a link to chat for your current community. Clicking it brings you on a chat server that belongs to the site you're on.

In the chat topbar you'll find your username. Clicking it brings you to your chat profile of the specific chat server. If you're on the General tab you'll find on the right of the page two subtabs: rooms you're currently in and rooms you're frequently in.
On the left you see the rooms you are an owner in.

If you don't find any rooms on that page, you can check for recent messages and if that is also without success you're last hope is search

When you're desperate and don't mind running an userscript for a couple of ... days you could use this chat scraper script.. When you have it installed and visit an chat userprofile, like mine on MSE Chat, it will start processing all rooms and list the number of messages per room. During processing this is what you'll see:

scraping in action

When a room is complete it will show the number of messages posted in that room. If the room has no messages from you it will be removed from the list. The script currently visits all rooms, frozen and deleted ones. Set nohide:true (click to see where) to change that behavior.

The script makes calls every 4 seconds to prevent being throttled by the SE network. I can't guarantee though that you won't hit an temporary IP-block, so use with care or make it call even less often.

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    Ah. Well... that seems poorly designed. So basically I can never find those chat rooms again because I haven't been there a while. Ok then, maybe if I go back through my comments I'll remember who I was talking to and be able to find the room. Thanks for the info though!
    – Clonkex
    Commented Jul 19, 2017 at 22:48
  • @Clonkex I've added the userscript that I had on the shelve to scrape the transcript a chatserver.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jul 20, 2017 at 16:25
  • Hey thanks! That's really cool! I'm a big fan of JS so userscripts (even though I didn't know what that term meant until yesterday) are right up my alley :D
    – Clonkex
    Commented Jul 20, 2017 at 22:43
  • @rene: Is there a way to find all of the chat rooms you've ever been in, or is "frequent" the best that can be done?
    – Nicol Bolas
    Commented Jun 10, 2019 at 18:31
  • @NicolBolas "frequent" is the best. An alternative to scraping everything is visiting your recent messages here for example and add the page number on the url (there is no UI navigate to the pages but it does work if you manually add the page=x query parameter). This is your page 3 as evidence: i.sstatic.net/8NJGF.png
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jun 10, 2019 at 18:39
  • I'm just seeing a wall of text everywhere here? How Do I find a "tab" with chat rooms? I was in a chat room 2 days ago, and now I want to go back and see if I got an answer. How do I do that?
    – Conrad B
    Commented Oct 22, 2020 at 17:17
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    @ConradB this one: chat.stackoverflow.com/users/337598/conrad-b?tab=recent ? and this is for all rooms: chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms?tab=all&sort=active
    – rene Mod
    Commented Oct 22, 2020 at 17:45
  • Thanks @rene , got the hang of prefixing the url with "chat". How do people discover chat except by getting invited, been on this thing a few years and never knew it existed. Very helpful now though thanks.
    – Conrad B
    Commented Oct 22, 2020 at 20:56
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    @ConradB it is in the "SE" drop down menu at the top left, together with help and logout. And all sites, except Stack Overflow there is a chat link in the footer. Lastly, chat is searchable in the help center: stackoverflow.com/help/search?q=chat
    – rene Mod
    Commented Oct 22, 2020 at 21:05
  • I suspect that the chat link being missing, on many page's footers and me never scrolling down that far hid the feature. I was expecting it in the menu, but I now suspect my browser is breaking some menu scripts, so I rarely have seen/used the menus. time to switch.
    – Conrad B
    Commented Oct 23, 2020 at 14:41

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