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This feature-request is posted in light of thoughts I've been having about ways to make chat more open to people, which I think will make room for people who are looking for the kind of avenue for social interaction or interactive help that chat can provide. The usual 20-rep threshold to gain the privilege to talk in chat is good at keeping out the majority of spammers and trolls, but it also means most people can't talk in chat. This post is my current swing at the question- "is there a more optimal tradeoff?". It's influenced by some cursory chat discussion (thanks to the people who offered feedback / critique there). I probably would have eternally procrastinated on posting this except that today, Two New Chat Rooms Experiment Geared Towards New Users was announced, and now I feel motivated for some reason. I've also added control options inspired by some of the abusive behaviours I saw during the first few hours of the experiment.

To preface, what I'm proposing here is opt-in. It gives sites and room owners choice. If they don't want this, they would just do nothing, and nothing would change for them.

The general idea I'd like feedback on is this (apologies, as I'm not sure how to present it more straightforwardly):

  • Let anyone with an account talk in chat

    • *Existing suspension mechanisms still apply, and suspension-related feature-requests are on the table
    • This would not include privilege to create or invite others to rooms

  • BUT, each site can decide through meta-discussion how to fine-tune this:

    • Option to only allow below-rep users who have at least one undeleted post on the parent Q&A site (alive for at least M days), and no posts deleted as rude/abusive in the past N years.
    • Option to make rate limiting more aggressive, and by how much.
      • Ex. If the site wants below-rep chat users to only be able to send one message every 10 minutes, they can do that. Only 5 per day? Sure. Up to them.
      • Setting to zero messages per <any time window> means below-rep chat users can't talk in chat.
    • Option to allow below-rep chat users to reply once to each chat message from a rep-qualified chat user that @<name>s them, regardless of what the above rate limit says, but still subject to the "globally-applicable" rate limit. This means privileged users can allow conversation to continue more freely, and they are in control. Ex. If people don't want to hear from a troll, they can just stop feeding / talking to said troll.
    • Option to disable oneboxing on below-rep chat users' messages (and if the site doesn't disable it site-wide, an option for the default value for each room)

  • And, room owners for site chatrooms have related controls for their rooms (probably under the room's "Access" tab):

    • Options to make things further constrained than the site-level settings:

      • They can set an even more aggressive rate limit than the site settings (and setting to zero messages per <any time window> means below-rep chat users can't talk in the room)
      • If the site settings allow replies to privileged users to skip the per-site-below-rep-rate-limit, the room owners can opt to disallow it.
      • Option to make these messages go into a queue for room-owner approval before being displayed to other room members, or hide these messages which have any spam/rude/abusive flags from users who can't handle chat flags until the flag is actioned.
      • Sites can pick what they want as default values for those room-level options.

    • An escape hatch to lift constraints (Ex. when someone demonstrates a pattern of good behaviour): Similar to feature-requests like Invite low rep users to participate in chat / Allow inviting people with rep < 20 to private chat?, and riffing on the existing feature where room owners can pick people to allow to talk in a room, allowing room owners to let specific below-rep chat users to talk in their chat room.

      • Any room owner can use this to lift the room-specific constraints, but it won't lift the site-level constraints.
      • Room owners with some higher amount of rep (maybe at the same level where gallery room privileges are earned) can lift the site-level restrictions, and are held accountable (to some degree) if that below-rep chat user misbehaves. If there's reason to, this can be further constrained so that it only applies when the grantor is in the room.
        • If the site decides they don't want this to be possible for their site's chat rooms, they can make it so through a site-level setting.

  • And for user settings, allow rep-privileged chat users to block/ignore all below-rep chat users, or choose a rep threshold to automatically ignore users below it.

I recognize that this isn't a simple feature-request. It took quite a few words to explain.

But I think this provides something that simpler requests like Invite low rep users to participate in chat don't: It lets us let low-rep users participate (and importantly, lets them initiate participation) and delegates power to each site / room owner to tune things to a level that works for them.

Even if a site or room owner is really concerned about spammers and trolls but wants to open the door a tiny crack, they can: They can let below-rep users only post one message per month, let them freely* reply to rep-privileged users, and provide guidance in the room for the interested user to post a message making a case for themselves, and have some via-reply conversation to get a feel for that person's behaviour.

Again, if site or room owner doesn't think they can handle it, or just doesn't want to deal with it, the option is there for them to choose today's behaviour and keep the status quo.

What do you think? What flaws do you think this has? Are there any changes you think could improve it?

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  • If low-rep users can be invited to chat, I'd like to see an interface that makes this take only a few clicks more than "Add a comment" (which certain people already use like it's a chat room). Moderators already can add anyone to chat, but it's too much effort to actually do it. Commented May 15 at 15:30
  • feature-request related to @Laurel's comment: Streamline moderators contacting users through chat Commented May 15 at 17:21

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These configuration options should not be delegated to Room Owners

I disagree with this proposal in that the ability to make these changes to a room should not be delegated to Room Owners. Dealing with user issues is a moderator function. Delegating these authorities to Room Owners will certainly increase spamming and trolling. As a moderator, I'm very aware that not all Room Owners have the best interest of the sites/system in mind, as there have been many problematic actors as Room Owners over the years who have used Room Owner abilities to cause problems. It's trivial to become a Room Owner, just by creating a room, or in some cases the system will just appoint a Room Owner, based on the amount of activity that user has in the room. Thus, there's really no vetting for who would have these abilities, nor any reason that they would understand the possible consequences.

As an example, even Stack Exchange itself periodically forgets what happens when there's an input box on the internet with no restrictions. An couple of examples of some of what happens are Discussions (large amounts of spam), and what happened with the initial introduction of the more public chat rooms that were recently created (R/A content, resulting in the rooms being shut down for a time while SE implemented more restrictions).

In addition, a typical room has only one or two Room Owners, with only large rooms having several. It's just not possible for a small number of people to keep up with the traffic that these settings permit.

I would be less against this if the settings were restricted to moderators. Even then, the choices to open things up would need to be weighed carefully, with consideration given to the potential impact to the room, the system, and available moderation resources across that chat server (e.g., SE chat has all moderators across the network handling flags, while MSE chat has only the relatively few MSE moderators).

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  • I'd prefer there be a role for Chat moderators or room moderators that are separate from site mods but require active permissions being awarded by site mods or staff. Mods do already have room-level control to grant specific users write access to individual chat rooms, regardless of reputation but I could (maybe) see a use for room permissions to ignore reputation but I feel like this should be rare enough that a mod could set it up. Commented May 28 at 0:10

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