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Kicking in chat is pretty useless and/or pointless. Everything that happens when you are kicked is, you are sent to the room list. There's no kick message, no "kicked by" message, no kick reason, nothing. For all a user knows, it's either a transient bug or a network hiccup. How is that useful?

The user can also immediately rejoin the chat. There's no repercussions for the user being kicked, it's just annoying. Even as a mod-only tool it's basically useless and annoying/confusing rather than a helpful moderation tool.

You may want to consider either removing it, or turning it into something more effective -- maybe user-specific room-specific 30 seconds long silencing.

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  • 4
    Or stop useless flagging, so I don't have to annoy you ;-)
    – Ivo Flipse
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:35
  • Mods can also suspend for an hour. A much more useful tactic.
    – C. Ross
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:37
  • @Ivo How is associating a room about LaTeX to the LaTeX site useless? Maybe you are not aware this is a moderator only option.
    – badp
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:40
  • Owners of a room can change the association, can't they?
    – Rebecca Chernoff
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:42
  • @Rebecca No they can't. I would've just done that myself, if I could've.
    – badp
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:43
  • It changed? I'm pretty sure they could before. Hrm.
    – Rebecca Chernoff
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:43
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    @Rebecca No, it was always that way -- but you, as a mod, could never notice :) What did change is that new rooms are automatically associated with your user's main chat accounts' site (originally, there was no default association.)
    – badp
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:44
  • I know I'm not a good test case, but I thought I had walked another user through doing it. I'm well aware of the default association.
    – Rebecca Chernoff
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:46
  • @Rebecca Isn't the association setting supposed to be under room info → edit, together with the room name and description options? I think I recall screenshots about it :)
    – badp
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:48
  • @Cross Your appreciation for nukes is duly noted, but that's quite the heavy handed measure.
    – badp
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:54
  • Yes, the host option. Guess it did change or I'm hallucinating.
    – Rebecca Chernoff
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:55
  • Kicking is just supposed to be a warning. If further actions need to be taken, then so be it, but kicking is supposed to be a step-one wake-up call to the user.
    – Rebecca Chernoff
    Jan 2, 2011 at 18:59
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    @Rebecca My point exactly is that the wake up call is broken as it is.
    – badp
    Jan 2, 2011 at 19:09
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    @Rebecca Everything that happens when you are kicked is, you are sent to the room list. There's no kick message, no "kicked by" message, no kick reason, nothing. For all a user knows, it's either a transient bug or a network hiccup. How is that useful?
    – badp
    Jan 2, 2011 at 19:14
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    @Rebecca I'm giving attention to a problem and suggesting a few ways to improve the situation. I don't have a magic wand that gives the perfect solution to problems, so I prefer to maybe use the answers part to discuss possible fixing solutions.
    – badp
    Jan 2, 2011 at 19:27

2 Answers 2

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I tend to agree with you.

Although I somewhat like the room-and-user-specific short-term silencing idea, here are the issues I see:

  • Is there a problem this solves? Has there ever been a situation were silencing a user in just one room and for a short time would actually help with anything?
  • In particular, if a user behaves in such a way that they have to be silenced, does it really make sense to do this in just one room?

I'm interested to hear about ideas, but currently I err on the side of just removing this "option".

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  • I just thought moderators could already suspend users for arbitrary times such as 30 seconds :)
    – badp
    Jan 3, 2011 at 15:22
  • @radp: no, suspension is 1 hour minimum (well, unless you manually unsuspend before)
    – balpha StaffMod
    Jan 3, 2011 at 15:30
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Well looks like room owners can no longer kick.

So now you know that it had to be a mod.

While I'm sad to see it go, I see the potential missuse, as before it was too easy to kick some one from a room.

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