We love to have a public chat room where anyone can join and talk, fostering people's interaction.
But sometimes people in a chat room need to be moderated, like when they talk too much off-topic, start using local languages frequently, all in all, degrading the quality that We, the owners, and the community wishes to have.
As a result, all the owners of our room, including me, discussed and later decided to make ours as a Gallery room where people need permissions to write. and as predicted by one of us, we did upset quite a number of users.
We had to take this hard step because public rooms currently don't give any moderation rights to the room owners to perform any task which can help keep the room consistent (like flaggng users, reporting user's messages as spam, removing certain messages, muting a user for sometime. any of them isn't there).
Can we have anything like this, which lets us follow the Allow-All-Block-Few policy rather than Block-All-Allow-Few approach that we currently are following?
EDIT Why we want to do this:
In our room, we had a simple rule:
- First search StackOverflow for the problems that you're facing. you'll probably find your answer
- If that doesn't work, post a new question, and link us to it, we'll answer it there, and in case it needs live discussion, we'll chat about it.
This simple rule/request was to make sure that
- All the users of StackOverflow get more variety of questions in the end
- So that they can search for them, and get answers. In turn, trying to make StackOverflow a better place for people in trouble.
Instead, guys who have access to chat, just jump in and start bombarding people with questions. This way, StackOverflow will never have a question about a problem which is unique and many users won't be able to search for it, since only Questions & Answers appear in Google and other searches.
Just to make sure that everybody plays by the these simple rules, for the good of the community, we wanted any feature like that.
