In early January we plan to lower the reputation requirement for Stack Overflow chat rooms to 1, allowing all users to enter and participate in public chat rooms.

Some chat actions will remain at their current rep requirement, such as:

• Starring messages (20 rep)

• Sending images (20 rep)

• Creating chat rooms (100 rep)

• Moving a comment exchange to a chat room (20 rep)

A space for newer users to get started

This is part of a set of changes that explore allowing new users to participate in more ways. (See also: expanded access to voting and comments). Earlier this year we kicked off an experiment making “lobby” chat rooms available for all Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange users. A number of helpful, seasoned users have put time and effort into helping the lobby rooms be a positive experience for the newer participants. This community wiki post detailing how the Stack Overflow lobby works is one example of this community-driven effort.

As it stands, currently 60% of all Lobby room participants have fewer than 20 reputation points. While the nature and quality of the conversation there is varied, as one would expect, this significant increase in engagement from novice users shows that chat is a promising space for newer users to grow their confidence, find their voice on the platform, and to become even more active contributors. The Stack Overflow Lobby will remain available and continue to be linked prominently on the chat landing page.

Cultural change and empowering room owners

We recognize that this is a big change and that the existing culture of some chat rooms may need to adjust. Ahead of the change, room owners will be more empowered to manage a room’s participants directly. They will be able to ban specific users from a room for an adjustable amount of time, and they will also have visibility on all spam or abusive flags raised in the room by default. This is in addition to the recently-added option for chat room owners to set up room-specific guidelines. These updates should help keep some of the burden of user management from falling to Stack Overflow moderators. All groups (room owners, mods, CM staff) will need to work together in the coming weeks and months to define how trolls and other problematic users are best escalated for more decisive action.

We have implemented additional measures to prevent bots and spam accounts from entering chat, including expansion of the Cloudflare-based “not a robot” check already in place on the main site. Further steps will also be taken to address concerns around account deletion and recreation as a method of ban evasion.

What about Stack Exchange chat?

The changes for room owners, as well as the bot/spam and profile deletion/recreation countermeasures, will be network-wide to bolster all chat rooms. We’ll post on Meta Stack Exchange when those updates are available. We expect to eventually roll out the reputation requirement change to Stack Exchange chat and Meta Stack Exchange chat as well, though the timeline for that is not yet determined.

We’ll post more about this update to Stack Overflow chat in January. For now, answers and comments here can be used to discuss how norms and processes might be best adapted as we look ahead.