You can click 'leave'

@Frank - True. However, sometimes the discussion is rather involved and ongoing and at those times I would also prefer not to have my icon float in with the impression that I intend to join in.

I wouldn't have that impression, @Travis, I would think that you had clicked on the link and was possibly interested in seeing how the conversation was going.

@Frank - How would you know if it were heated or interesting though? All you see for context is the single link. For all you know you could be walking in to some sort of flame war or intense disagreement. Further, if the conversation happened at some time in the past, there is no point in joining if you wish to review the conversation. It is very rare for a discussion moved to chat to actually have content added to it afterwards by anyone except the parties involved at the point it was moved.

Still, floating in on a heated discussion doesn't give me the impression of wanting to join in, at all. Also, I see no reason not to join an old room when viewing the conversation. You can always leave when you're done and ready to move on. Not a hassle at all for me.

@Frank - There is no reason to join the room because you are not going to talk. It wastes time loading, it wastes time waiting for it to unload when you click leave. Best case scenario your time is wasted. Beyond that you may have to deal with entering a room which is going through some heated back and forth (or worse). It is fine if you are okay with having your time wasted, but in general that is not desirable.

Not any slower to load than the transcript, for me. No time wasted here

@Frank - It takes roughly 5 seconds to load into a room. There is even a loading modal which indicates the load is taking place. Until the entire room is loaded, leave cannot be selected. Once the entire room has loaded, leave can be selected, at which point you are returned to the all rooms page. Clicking on the transcript loads in approximately 350 milliseconds.

Both take less than a second for me.

Are you refreshing or are you loading?

Also, there is an irony in using this feature for this question :)

However, the situation I was referring to was mostly for mod situations and not just from extended comments.

@TravisJ I was loading, tavern on the meta.

It takes less than a second.

That was the same one I had loaded as well. However mine took a few seconds as the loading bar indicated. Perhaps it is because I do not have an open socket to this exchange.

Opening a socket is what takes time, and if you have a cached connection it will load much quicker.

What's your internet speed?

15mbps I think

Yours?

Are you currently in a Stack Exchange chat room?

(aside from this one)

@TravisJ yes, 8 currently

So it is highly likely you already had an open socket to work with.

@TravisJ testing

Download: 18.02 Upload: 3.64 mbps

okay so very similar

Now, close all of your open sockets, including this one. and then try to open the chat room.

With an open socket it seems to take roughly 2 seconds to open one of these rooms.

It is still in my opinion excessive to open the entire room environment to merely view a discussion.

@TravisJ no diff here