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enter image description here

When I try to create a new Chat Stack Exchange room from here, and type "meta" in the "select a site" box, I see only 8 child meta sites. Any specific reason for this?

Update:

I just noted Which per-site-metas are offered in the chat-room creation dialogue? (pointed out by Shadow Wizard). The conclusion of the experiment there was:

  1. This experiment suggests that only the meta sites, for which at least one room already exists, are offered.

  2. ...the distinction between beta sites and graduated sites is not sufficient to explain this.

So, if I'm reading it correctly, it is currently impossible to create a room hosted on those child metas which do not already have an existing meta room (smells like a bug!)? Or is there a way to bypass this restriction somehow?

I can think of several legitimate reasons as to why a site may choose to keep their main chat rooms and meta chat rooms separate. Killing off that freedom of choice, and that too non-uniformly, isn't a good idea. If this really is a rather than (for a good cause), then it should be fixed!

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  • 1
    Spitballing, I wonder if its cause they're older sites, but mathematics educators dosen't fit that...
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 7:59
  • I too suspected that initially, but in that case, even Server Fault should have been included as it was one of the trilogy sites. Moreover, yeah, Mathematics Educators certainly shouldn't have been there, by that logic.
    – user437611
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 8:02
  • Possible duplicate of Which per-site-metas are offered in the chat-room creation dialogue?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 8:06
  • @ShadowWizard Thanks for the reference. Given that that question wasn't a bug report, and didn't receive any answer I'd refrain from marking this as a duplicate myself. However, if the community wishes to mark it as duplicate they're free to do so. If this really is a bug and not status-bydesign SE really should fix it. I can think of several reasons to keep main chats and meta chats separate. I've also updated my question a bit, just in case anyone knows how to bypass this restriction given the current state of things.
    – user437611
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 8:14
  • OK, closed the other way around since there's answer here now explaining what's going on. (Well, in a sense)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 9:29

1 Answer 1

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I've just created this room, parented to Ask Different Meta by intercepting the POST call made when creating a room as normal, just changing the host parameter at the end, and resubmit the call via curl. Note that I've redacted my fkey for security reasons, and there is a &noDupeCheck=true&noDupeCheck=false parameter of which I'm not sure how that is supposed to work, but it will skip the 'duplicate chatroom dialog' you sometimes get when creating a room. If it's not present in your original call, you should probably add it.

curl 'https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/save' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:65.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,/;q=0.8' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5' --compressed -H 'Referer: https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/save' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Cookie: [redacted]' -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' --data 'fkey=[redacted]defaultAccess=read-write&name=Test+room&description=Test+room&host=apple.meta.stackexchange.com&tags=&noDupeCheck=true&noDupeCheck=false'

The response should be something like

<html><head><title>Object moved</title></head><body>
<h2>Object moved to <a href="/rooms/info/90923/test-room?tab=general">here</a>.</h2>
</body></html>

enter image description here

Similarly, it should be possible to intercept the 'save' call when changing a room's name or description, and manually changing the host parameter. I'm now wondering what would happen if you choose a non-existing site there ...

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    And now it appears in the list! So it means the list showing only meta sites that already have associated chat rooms. Heh.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 9:27
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    Yep, and if we're diligent enough we can make this [bug] not reproducible anymore ...
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 9:29
  • Associate all dem rums! :P
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 9:30
  • @ShadowWizard: I'll let Dr. Malcom respond. I don't see any great reason to have meta chat rooms with the exception of chat hanging off of this site. Do we really need a third place for our second places?
    – Jon Ericson StaffMod
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 16:17
  • By the way, is it possible to change the host of a room from main to meta (for mods)? I'm trying to rehome a QCSE main chat to QCSE meta.
    – user437611
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 13:21
  • The same trick should do the ... eh ... trick.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Apr 10, 2019 at 13:30
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    Wow. This is interesting. Would you mind adding this to the unofficial documentation?
    – user7886229
    Commented Jun 9, 2019 at 4:02
  • @JBis I'm on a break right now and I'll probably forget about it once I get home. I would do some more testing before adding a hack like this to any kind of documentation, but feel free to add a link to here or summary yourself.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Jun 9, 2019 at 7:02

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