The correct use of chat rooms, for new users (improve visibility and description)

Question

This publication is not related to the chat rooms created or derived from the comments on question and/or answer posts.

Maybe this question is bad for old users who already know how to use the entirety and complexity of the site and its tools, but I can't find the right way to transmit certain information to new users, in this case the use of the chat rooms.

I will make these observations as if I were a new user:

• First I have seen that each site normally has an active general chat room. The problem is that these have a different name in each site and it is not clear which is which.

• When I go to see the chat rooms of a site I find this swarm:

• If I go to the site SO, things don't look very good other than to say:

• Some of these chat rooms are oriented to the use of feed or boots... causing a relatively new user, upon seeing this and wanting to interact with the user, not knowing which is the appropriate chat room.

• As a foreign language user, I try to understand some of the descriptions of the chat rooms, but some descriptions don't even address the goal or one of the goals of the chat room.

So, based on the previous arguments, I come up with the idea of standardizing at least the name and descriptions of the chat rooms.

• At least if the chat room is for a feed or boot to follow something, putting [Feed Follow] or [Bot Follow] in the description or name would help to recognize it in a simple way.

make the texts a little more descriptive.

• Likewise, if the objective of a chat room is:

Here you can make questions based on opinions to the community.

either

Here you can ask questions before publishing in META.

either

Here you can ask questions about how the main site works.

put it in the description.

Premise: I understand that room owners are free to name chat rooms whatever they want, so I may have to persuade them (in chat) to change to more standard names. But what I'm looking for is for the community to agree that if it's a good or bad idea... based on this post then I can tell the owner of the room something like: look, the community thinks it would be good to do this standard, could you help us... etc... etc....

This is not an obligation or wanting to seek a radical change:

I had to try it... Some will see this as a project for individual sites, perhaps some community leader will be interested when they see this post and provoke an initiative on the individual site. I didn't want to keep the idea in my mind. I just want to see how the community reacts.

Project implementation example:

• The general chat of META SE is Tavern on the Meta

The owner of the room could rename it to: [Main]Tavern on the Meta adding leading [Main] User would identify it that is the Main Chat Room of the site.

• On the site SO there are two sites that confuse me:

  • Meta Stack Overflow ... (is what you can see)
  • The Meta Room

In this scenario I would like to see something like: [META Chat] The Meta Room where [META Chat] indicates is the main META Chat for that site.

View Example:

The truth is that the current design for viewing chat rooms doesn't help much either hahahahahaha.

Answer 1

So, based on the previous arguments, I come up with the idea of standardizing at least the name and descriptions of the chat rooms.

No, let's not do that.

Chat is the "third"-place,. The goal and purpose of rooms is either hinted at in the name or description. If that isn't enough, you can always join the room, ask politely whether you can discuss kittens there and from there you either get "Yes", "No", "Try room Dogs 101". That is not a lot of friction to get into the right direction.

We're not going to police chat room names and descriptions for the few first time users that might get overwhelmed on that chat landings page.

If rooms really care about what you can and can't ask they do put links to more extensive guidance in their description. It is not much to ask for new users to read-up on guidance before diving in.

When there is a need a per-site meta post with site relevant chat rooms and purpose can be maintained but most sites only have a handful of permanent rooms so it is unlikely that new users will have to ping-pong between many rooms before they found one that suits their needs.

Answer 2

Working on options to make the chat platform friendlier for new chat users is a great idea. However, this should be handled as the diffusion of "best practices" rather than compulsory standardization, at least in the short/mid-term.

Side note: There are non-mandatory standards and frameworks, like ISO 9000, but the term standard is more commonly used to refer to mandatory specifications / rules rather than voluntarily adopted.

At the current state of things on the public question-and-answer platform, chatroom names and descriptions can't be strictly standardized for all instances. I don't see any chance this could happen in the short or mid-term.

There might be chances that main chatrooms be standardized across "dead sites". By "dead sites," I'm referring to sites having so little activity that per-site community moderators and other community members ignore what happens in the main chatroom of their site, but in such cases, it doesn't make sense to spend the CM Team time doing this manually. A volunteer might be willing to write code to automate this task, but I don't think this will get the required support. Let's see what happens.

In the meantime, I suggest you keep talking about things that could be improved but try to focus on clearly defining the problem without spending too much time on proposing a specific solution until you get feedback from the community, including a clear idea of the size of the population that is interested on the topic.