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What are the System Users for Chat and what are the point of those users? They always seem to have negative user IDs.

I've been able to find 9 current System Users for Chat:

Do these users differ at all from the Feeds user that runs feeds you add to a room, or are they specialized users? How are new users created? Eg. One for your favourite SE site so it can be invited into the room.

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  • There's also Lazers on the Arqade chat (user ID -23).
    – bwDraco
    Commented Oct 3, 2014 at 5:54

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To quote:

This is a system user, used (for example) to represent an external data feed.

They are functionally identical to the "Feeds" user.

Why is this useful? During our internal testing, we found it desirable to hide one feed, but not all of them. Besides, now we can get individual names and logos for each.

My plan is to detect SOFU/SE feeds and do some icon lookup via stackauth - but for now this is limited to ♦ mods: if you have a room with a feed (or feeds), they can click a button to give that feed an identity.

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  • Perfect! That's what I figured.
    – Chealion
    Commented Aug 5, 2010 at 17:04
  • 1
    hmm... what exactly has been "completed" here?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jun 15, 2015 at 15:12
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    What's the "Chicken" user?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Dec 11, 2017 at 13:31

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