Can we get a list of rooms that were shut down due to violating those rules, so we have solid example of what not to do?

@ShadowWizard They're long into the deep bit bucket in the basement. The point of this is, each one alone isn't useful as an example when thinking of how it would apply to the whole.

Fair enough I guess. More important question is, who will enforce this? Site moderators, or you, the community team of SE?

I'm super proud of 97% of our chat rooms that remain some of the safest places to hang out and 'talk shop' on the Internet Wow. What a different tone than the blog post. This actually reads as some sympathy with the hard-working part of the community!

@PatrickHofman to be honest, not really. The blog post starts with "The majority of them are generous and kind", and ends with "Every day, tens of thousands of people on SO take a break from their workday..." paragraph. It's just longer, and try to provoke us on purpose so it will be noticed. Anyway... not a proper place to keep discussing this. :)

heh, I literally was having an argument on twitter with some guy over this :( . And I think chat moderation starts with the community. It ends... in fire. But I'll write an answer if I have anything to add.

As an aside, the SO blog post you linked clearly violates the vulgar language policy some of us room mods have been enforcing in chat. Is Hanlon's post an implicit revocation of this policy?

Here's a challenge: How about you own up to your inclusivity pledge and offer moderators and ROs of highish-traffic rooms courses in non-aggressive communication and community moderation? (that's a thing). We're all volunteering our time and effort and it would be a nice "thank you" while actually promoting a cultural shift towards inclusivity. It's not expensive, it'd be a good thing for inclusivity overall™ and it'd go a long way to show you care.

@DSM but it's a blog, not chat. Different platform, different goals, different CoC. Plus, being management, Jay gets the privilege to talk in whatever way he wants, like any leader. :)

As Donald Knuth said about chat room optimization: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%". ;)

Use Riot.im (based on Matrix.org) for decentralized uncensorable encrypted chat. By the way, the average rate of sociopathy in the population is 4%.

@Chloe room owners have written multiple clients ourselves (like github.com/Canop/miaou ) the reason we're around in StackOverflow is because we like it here - not because we're lacking alternatives.

Can you tell me what exactly I am supposed to do with chat posts that do get flagged? You give me options of 'valid', 'invalid' and 'not sure' (without any context, but leave that aside for a bit). What does 'valid' mean? Am I supposed to interpret it as the flag is valid (and hence, the post should be removed), or that the post is valid and should be retained? I always click the 'not sure' option because .. well, I am not sure what exactly you want me to do. Perhaps you should spend a bit more time on UX.SE, that will help you avoid such double negation interface.

RIP C++ Lounge then lol

Perhaps I'm reading things incorrectly here, but this sounds like a 'one strike and your chat room is out, without warning'-policy. This is aggressive, indeed. Is my interpretation correct, or will you send out warnings, in practice?

@ShadowWizard Well two places I know it happened was the C++ Lounge on SO and the general discussion chatroom on SciFi.SE. It shouldn't be too hard to find the relevant meta discussions on the respective sites.

@TimPost Well... as with any product like a curling iron, when you see warnings like "do not stick this in any orifice", it means people have actually done that and then complained to the company about it being...problematic.

Is there a reasonable chance to get some improvements in the chat moderation tools to be able to enforce the rules in the way SE asks us to?

I light my campfires with my laser

Ah yep I can confirm that you close rooms in that case, unfortunately you suggest that it would be possible to reopen chats. However you didn't give a final statement for more then 6 month, that you will leave the room closed. That is how you lost my trust in community management. It is valid and correct to close rooms for good reasons, but don't imply that there are chances to change that if you already decided to leave a room closed.

If self moderation is a problem, then shouldn't the Room Owners who encouraged these issues be the ones held accountable as opposed to entire rooms?

"encouraged"? i assume you mean didn't act against it? or participated.

If the room can't self-moderate, the room can't work and gets closed. That's a separate thing from an individual promoting things that can't work and get closed, and that individual gets dealt with, separately. You can't pretend a bad room suddenly becomes okay when a bad room owner is removed.

I agree with Travis J. You shouldn't be closing down a room forever because the moderators aren't doing their job. That's heavy handed, it will cause problems, and it isn't nice. You'd be contravening your own code of conduct. Fix the real problem. If a room is going to pot, don't close it down, get some new moderators.

I would love to upvote this post. It's awesome. But I can't associate the word aggressively with making people safer

What about rooms that violate the code of conduct and flags of violations are: 1) Routinely Invalidated too fast for any sane moderator to notice. 2) People who flag blatantly be-nice policy fails are retaliated against?

@cde That sounds a lot like the description following "So, if we see rooms where:" in this question. If you know of such a room, and if you're right that normal flags are ineffective, you should probably let the CMs know.

@TImPost I would also like to see examples of what is considered a violation in order to gauge how the staff moderators will interpret the rules.

@Zanna They just mean more forcefully. Google's definition of "aggressively" includes "in a determined and forceful way". It also includes a fantastic example sentence which perfectly matches the usage of "aggressively" in the post: "foreign-owned banks are aggressively marketing credit cards"

I don't see the big deal. Personally, I love going into StackOverflow chat to ask a question about something .NET-related, only to have to apologize to everyone for interrupting their discussion about dicks and porn stars.

@TylerH Lounge<C++> was not permanently closed. In fact it still exists even though a big chunk of members moved to Discord.

@Shoe although Lounge<C++> and StackOverflow's code of conduct are perhaps more at odds than anything. At my first time at the C++ lounge (some time in 2012) I got suspended and berated (from all chat) for 30 minutes for asking if anyone was participating in a C++ programming contest (and literally just that). The lounge has been genuinely offensive towards outsiders (and members) for a long time - while it's not permanently closed traffic is less than a third of what it was before.

And while the lounge was made out of a bunch of really smart people (mostly) who were individually kind and welcoming but created a toxic culture.

@BenjaminGruenbaum The Lounge<C++> has effectively died as of ~2 years ago since most of us migrated out of the horrible chat.SO experience (poor moderation tools, consistent complaining about off topic vs on-topic, odds with StackExchange, headaches with the moderators, etc). It shows if you see the significant activity drop, and I wouldn't be surprised if this change happened with more chatrooms.

@LightnessRacesinOrbit "Not dead yet! I think I'll go for a walk" the lounge has tamed significantly since the discord came about.

@Mgetz: Or, "I'm going outside and I may be some time"? ;)

@ShadowWizard "Can we get a list of rooms that were shut down due to violating those rules, so we have solid example of what not to do?" The whole point is that it's impossible to write down a list of rules governing human interactions. The post clearly explains what behaviour is unacceptable.

"Offensive things that violate our CoC" I find it curious that the word "Offensive" is there. I can't believe you would allow non-offensive things that violate the CoC, so I can only assume that the word "Offensive" was slipped in there for the same reason it has been used most regularly nowadays - to begin the slippery slope of "If anyone declares they are offended by you get ready for the beatstick." If history serves as any example, soon the "CoC" part will be so loosely interpreted that offense-taking is the new weapon of choice.

@DavidRicherby "clearly explain"?? Really? Then what is the meaning exactly of "Offensive stuff"? Without giving actual examples, even posting a cat picture can be considered offensive to dog lovers who hate cats. They can flag the picture, and have the whole room closed.

@ShadowWizard The whole point is that you can't generalize from examples. If you publish a list of rules, people will lawyer them and carefully calibrate their posting ("You can't flag me -- this post only scores 74/100 and the threshold is 75"). And don't interpret things so literally. If people want to claim they're offended by cat photos, that will receive very little sympathy; conversely, if SE declares that cat photos are fine, somebody will post a photo of a cat being run over by a car.

@DavidRicherby I disagree - The post "clearly explains" that a vague and ever-moving guideline will be used as a basis to start silencing people.

@EthanTheBrave Guidelines about what kind of behaviour is acceptable are always somewhat vague. It's impossible to do anything else. We're dealing with people, not robots.

If you're running community moderated chats, then you really should look into how other people already handle it. It should be doable with the same concept that you use to moderate the Stack Exchanges. Anything less that will require dedicated moderators from the community.

The culture of our rooms must be welcoming above anything else to anyone that puts forward a good-faith effort to join and interact. (emphasis mine) I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you got carried away in the moment. Surely you don't mean to say that inclusiveness overrides mission, do you?

The culture of our rooms must be welcoming above anything else to anyone that puts forward a good-faith effort to join and interact.

@KevinB Joining and interacting is not the same as being on-topic. Lots of people join and interact all over the site; that doesn't mean their interactions are valuable or useful. The phrase I highlighted appears to place being welcoming above being on topic. In my opinion, that is the path to irrelevance.

Sure, but my point is that there's been a lot of people complaining about chat not being welcoming lately from people who haven't attempted to join and interact. We are a welcoming community, the dispute is more on the topics being discussed than us not being welcoming.

Isn't closing a room forever for everyone because of the comments of a few people once upon a time a really stupid idea? Why not kick/punish/ban the offenders?

The wording of this notice gives the impression that there isn't going to be a warning. If it gets sour, the room gets wiped. And by "shut the room down permanently", it almost sounds like you're going to hard-delete the room and all of its messages at the database level. I agree we need stricter moderation and better mod tools, but there ought to be a warning before a room is to be shut down.

"he culture of our rooms must be welcoming above anything else to anyone that puts forward a good-faith effort to join and interact." <- And exactly this is what I wish from your sites.

@peterh I think you missed the “good faith” part. You have to start engaging in good faith to get the benefits of engaging with the sites in good faith.

Does this need to be communicated to chat users who don’t frequent the SE meta, and if so, how will that be done?

This is the warning. If you cannot follow the rules or if you support other people not following the rules, you'll be dropped. If you're making an effort to prevent rulebreaking, you're not doing either of those things, so you have no reason to be concerned at this announcement.

Efforts to make SO more "welcoming" have been a recurring them for years and years. Seems like this is getting old. If it's not overly welcoming maybe there's a practical reason for that, like warding off those who aren't taking the site seriously enough? Just a thought.

@Hack-R I think it's more "we need growth..numbers...money" so they can fund obviously bad ideas like Documentation and Teams instead of fixing stuff like search and coming up with better ways to maintain the high standards this site had 5+ years ago that don't involve punishing people who try and get new users to stick to the rules of the site.

Welcome to the 15th century! Please follow your local Inquisition representative and burn those who speak God's name in vain! Seriously now, closing a room should be the last measure for this kind of problem, you should cleanse the toxic factor, not kill the whole thing because someone overstepped and there was no vigilante available. Get new mods if the current ones aren't working as expected, they are voluntaries after all. I'm going to look for a couple of duplicated question and flag them before someone closes StackOverflow for low-quality unmoderated content. Laughs sarcastically.

TL;DR version: Don't take the easy way to enforce policies, it will be better for everyone if you put the effort now instead of having everyone take the blame of a single person. If the room encourages savage stuff then block the room for a long while and punish those who made it trash.

As long as flags for a message are out of context and the flagger doesn't have to provide some reasons (like in voting to close a question), the complete system is broken and the result can be seen here. I can't count how often I raged against dumb approved flags and got flagged for the rage again. So much charm! I spend time in chat for the community feeling and not to primarily help. I help friends, that status needs to evolve. Thats why I only chat in one room, in gallery mode... Also make flags a room thing: only joined members should be able to do that. They know the context!

@Nij It would, or at least might, be reasonable to say "This is the warning" if it were perfectly clear what's acceptable and what isn't. But -- for good reasons -- that isn't perfectly clear, and it's liable to be a moving target. Failure to hit an unclear moving target should not be grounds for anything as drastic as deletion of a chat room without other warning. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying that we need unambiguously explicitly specified rules that define everything. I'm envisaging a process more like this: [... continues]

... 1. There are some unambiguously explicitly specified rules; breaking those may result in immediate annihilation. (For what it's worth, I think that's a bad idea.) 2. Inevitably there will be kinds of badness that aren't covered by these rules; those get a warning, and sufficiently persistent badness-after-warning gets you nuked.

I think it'd be useful for there to be an open line of communication between RO's and CM's/Mods, a back-channel if you will. We're sort of their first line of defense when it comes to moderating chat, and it would be useful if there was a place where we could ask questions/discuss problems directly without potentially making problems worse by the discussion of specific users being found by said specific users.

@Nij "If you're making an effort to prevent rulebreaking ... you have no reason to be concerned at this announcement". Not at all. This post states that merely 'making an effort' isn't sufficient: the chat room community must remain vigilant to react whenever there are problems, in their chatroom, even if they're not personally involved. Or at least, that is what I read here. I haven't seen an official response to my earlier question on whether this is indeed the intention, so I guess we will have to wait for that.

I once got a warning about imminent suspension because I used the F word in a post. Seeing this now makes me think that SE in general is becoming the network equivalent of a Nany State. The CoC asks you to use terms that you would use in a conversation with someone you respect, but out there in the real world people who respect each other will use adult words. The CoC should be reworded to say that you shouldn't use words that cannot be said in a PG-13 cartoon show.

I am very encouraged by the large positive score on this post, but I am also discouraged by all the snide and snippy comments by people complaining like all of a sudden SE will become some kind of crazy dictator where one step over the line results in the death penalty. The way I read this, this only applies to situations where things are COMPLETELY out of hand and have been for awhile. I'm not active in chat, but I remember running across a certain room and being absolutely blown away by some of the crud that people were defending in it. Nuke those things.

what version of Paranoia is SE running on? just to update my character sheet. The Machine is good, the machine is fair. Now on topic, i hope there's, uhm, moderation, from all sides. nanny distopic digital governments isn't my top choice of community, not at first atleast. anarchic harassing conversations isn't either okay, though. a middle ground that respects culturally diverse environements (specially those away from the american way of living) would be prefered, if not for us foregners, atleast for the internet's sanity.

The title of this topic is SO 1984.

Who enforces self moderation? Oneself?

@Ajean you were absolutely blown away by what was being defended in a StackOverflow chat? Did you merely observe? It looks like you've never participated in an actual room aside from 4 messages in Moderator Election chat rooms. Couldn't find anything near your messages that was worthy of being "absolutely blown away by the crud". Maybe you did see something, I'm just trying to point out that everyone ragging on chat has essentially never even used it.

Join in, you can make a difference outside of piling on the hatewagon

The chat message box should have a tool tip in it, if you haven't typed anything yet. "suggest improvements" instead of "add comment" is keeping me from adding a lot of noise.... Just put the TL;DR of the Be Nice in there, grayed out. Kinda like how every CR now has a stared and pinned message to that effect. But you'll read this every time before you click the box.

@EthanTheBrave aint that the truth. Power hungry fools that care about diversity and think people on stack exchange are being misogynists are such a joke. "Muh Soggy Knee" only exists in very rare cases, such as mentally deranged serial killers who only kill women.

"...the Anecdotal3000 percentage generator implanted by Stack Exchange, Inc." - wow! Can I get one of those? The stuff the aliens put in All Those Years Ago has been on the fritz for a while now - it seems like all I ever get from them these days is info-mercials for grznrbnfr'tzn from Alpha Centauri, which isn't useful to me because A) I lost my Illudium Q-32 Space Modulator and so can't dial in to order one, and B) I don't have the six hands needed to make it work. So if the CIA (who are always after me! Geez, will you people get a life?!?) could implant one of those - KEWL!

@copper.hat - that's why the mind-control implants are needed.

@BobJarvis: I need some of those :-).

Just eliminate people commenting at new users - it's so obvious. (the idea that they "need to be helped" with comments is totally fatuous.) any number of solutions exist, for example only high point users could comment at newbies. many of the high-point users are also incredibly rude, but it would be easier to help socialize them.

@Fattie, I don't think this is the place for anyone to socialize... Being civil, or even enjoiable, is one thing. If newbies or high point users are having issues socializing there are other venues for them... Reddit, for one, is not a toxic wasteland, there are wonderful groups of support there, where feelings and personal issues can be freely debugged.

"welcoming [...] to anyone that puts forward a good-faith effort to join and interact" - it's refreshing to see an acknowledgement from SE staff that not everybody deserves to be welcomed with open arms; especially after that unfortunate blog post. Too bad that SE seems to be moving away from the "good-faith effort" qualifier in relation to questions from new SO users...