As previously announced, all users can participate in public chat rooms on Stack Overflow, regardless of reputation.

Today (January 12, 2026), we’ve updated the reputation requirement. Later this week, we’ll be directing the chat navigation links (on the left side and on the top right menu) to the main chat landing page for all users. At this time, those links still lead to the Stack Overflow Lobby for users with less than 20 reputation.

Why open the doors so wide, and so suddenly?

When we announced this upcoming change, we received feedback that some community members would prefer that we just “crack open the doors” a bit, or allow for various forms of gate-keeping. Those more gradual approaches are not without merit, but we are aiming for broader change and more openness on the platform, expanding options for users seeking to join and contribute. Our product team spent much of 2025 working to improve the chat experience on the site, implementing many improvements requested by the community over the years. Some updates were focused on design and user experience, while others were more “under the hood” and focused on stability and sustainability.

We’re aiming for community growth as a return on that investment. This is not about adding characters and junk content to shore up contribution metrics. We want deeper human interaction in the increasingly AI-saturated world, more collaboration and problem solving, new and more diverse voices. We feel confident this is a shared goal with the existing community. Indeed, many of you have spoken about how you took your first steps on Stack Overflow in chat. Less-structured and real-time conversational spaces are where bonds can be forged and communities can be built. In this time of slower Q&A content velocity and more places for quick answers, getting 20 rep in order to enter chat is a taller order. So we’re seeing how it goes if we remove that barrier.

We hear your concerns, and we share plenty of them. It’s a step into unknown territory.

Will legacy chat rooms feel their identity is becoming just another Lobby experience? Perhaps.
Will chat room dabblers remain in the Lobby, while those searching for more focused conversations find their way to topic specific chat rooms? Possibly.
Most likely, it will be something in between, with both expected and unexpected nuances, but we will not know if we do not try.

We want to press that this change is NOT irreversible. We can always change the rep requirement back up to 20, or somewhere in between. Let’s see how this experience rolls out and changes the environment of chat.

What can room owners do to adapt?

First and foremost, room owners can set up room guidelines using the new functionality. Some users will read them, and others won’t, but having guidelines established shows that there are expectations and something to justify revoking room privileges if a user does not follow them. Additionally, consider updating a chat room’s description to clearly state what the room is about and the type of conversation that’s expected there. This up-front clarity can help protect the culture that the community has already established for that space.

Room owners also now have the option to ban specific users from a chat room for a set amount of time, up to 7 days. The kick-mute option is fully configurable now in that way. Users kicked from a room have that action noted on their chat profile, visible to site moderators who may be assessing user behavior across multiple rooms.

Room owners who wish to discuss emergent issues and strategies, with one another or with CMs, can come to the Chat Room Owner Lounge. We’ll be maintaining this room for the near future as a resource and as a collaboration space. Aspiring chat room owners are also welcome; we’ll need to grow the number of users in that role as well.

The gallery configuration for chat rooms also remains as an option to limit participation. That has its drawbacks, but some owners may feel that’s the best path forward, for now.

What’s next?

We will learn and adapt together. Managing and moderating chat rooms takes people, and ultimately it will be community members (old and new) who continue to shape the culture. The room owners, past and present, of the Lobby rooms deserve credit and accolades for the work they’ve been doing and the guidelines they developed, especially given how quickly we learned that direct CM oversight of the Lobbies was not as scalable as we’d hoped. The approach taken with the Lobby rooms may be needed for other rooms, though there will no doubt be other ideas tried. The Stack Overflow Lobby remains as an introduction and onboarding space, pinned on the chat landing page.

While community managers don’t have the ability to be everywhere, we do have updated tooling that provides insight into chat activity across all rooms. These systems will be observational at first, but automated action is possible and those options will be utilized as needed.

We’ll be watching what happens on Stack Overflow to help determine when any similar reputation change might roll out to the broader Stack Exchange network. The varying needs and sizes of those communities may require a different approach.

Got feedback?

The traditional venues (answers and comments here, as well as new questions) remain available. But we’re also trying something new(-ish) that aligns with our real-time conversations mission – a feedback chat room!

The Product Feedback: Universal Chat Access room will be open for a few weeks (at least) as a space for feedback and discussion about the reputation change. It will be overseen by Spevacus and the CM team, and will include participation from product and engineering staff members at times. This itself is an experiment as we look to create new areas for conversation with the community about changes to the platform. We hope that the real-time nature of chat allows you to contribute thoughts you feel are important in a venue other than Meta, and that back-and-forth with the team dedicated to working on chat creates a more earnest feedback loop.