Stack Overflow chat opening up to all users in January; Stack Exchange chat later

When the Lobby project started, I feared that it would end up in a cacophony of spammers, desperate help seekers with question bans, and well-meaning users who just can't put two coherent sentences together. I've occasionally looked in there, often when there was a flag or two being raised in the room (a daily occurrence), and my impression is that I wasn't too far off the mark. Just looking at the trash can suggests a steady stream of garbage (and the transcript doesn't even include all the deleted messages).

Obviously the Lobby will always be the worst place in this regard, because it's advertised to new users and it sounds very much like it should be a noisy tavern rather than a place for more focussed discussion. That being said, unleashing 1-rep users on the whole server carries a very real risk of highly increased traffic from people who have been banned from the main site.

I'm one of the room owners of a chatroom for a popular language on Stack Overflow. We've had fairly low traffic in recent times, like most of the network. But I fear that channeling all those users who can't ask their questions (or, heck, post their comments) on the main site into chat will lead to considerable strain to the technical (as in non-social) chatrooms on Stack Overflow. Firstly, the low baseline traffic means that a given amount of noisy traffic bump overwhelms the chatroom more easily. Secondly, disproportionately many 1-rep users will have a track record of not being good at asking questions or following site rules in general.

I'm hopeful that my fears will turn out to be unfounded. But I can promise that if the reputation drop announced here will lead to significant increase in moderation burden (which we will have to shoulder ourselves, as it always is the case), I will very aggressively push back against the section of users who shouldn't have access and are being problematic. I mean generous application of kicks, but we only have so much time to baby-sit the room in real time. If this change becomes a problem, I will advocate for turning the technical chatrooms on Stack Overflow into gallery mode, and only giving write access to users above a certain rep limit. That way the moderation burden is decreased, since approving new users can happen more asynchronously than reactively moderating the chatroom.

In addition to the other points that have been raised, I wanted to ask why you think that having this content released across the network is a positive thing:

I'm an RO of the Lobby and the primary reason I requested to join was to help in the cleanup effort before the number of flags across the chat network overflowed the counter. I haven't cherry-picked that moment of the Lobby, that's just what I walked into when I started what feels like a shift today.

1. 9 messages moved to trash
2. Two moderators also doing work
3. Nothing of substance other than "Hi"
4. Someone having to be asked what they didn't understand about the room guidelines and description they'd literally just accepted to join the room
5. Someone got kicked during that time

I don't see how this can be considered a positive thing for user engagement. Chat rooms have communities that have been built up for over a decade. We know each other after years of engagement, we check up on each other if someone disappears for a while or something feels off in the way they are behaving.

The rooms foster expertise precisely because they maintain an atmosphere where everyone acknowledges subject matter experts and they know they're not wasting their time if they pick up on a coding problem in their domain. They are certainly not looking to log into the situation in my picture.

I have a lot of concerns over this, and I honestly don't think that Stack Overflow (SO) Inc is aware of what is going to be involved to make this a success, and I don't think the community (that includes curators and mods) have the tools or time to make it a success.

Let's start off with the Lobbies. I'm going to be focus on the SO Lobby throughout this post, but I want to discuss the SE Lobby to start with as well. The two lobbies have worked very differently. The SE lobby, from when I visit, more frequently has a "water cooler" vibe; it has many moderators that are active in the room and an single RO. The SO Lobby is often quite the opposite; it normally has 0-1 active moderators, and 2-3 active ROs at a time. As for the messages, it's not uncommon for it to be utter chaos. Code Dumps, spam, trolling, utter nonsense, non-English content. If you want to see examples, and the regularity, of such content, just check the Lobby Trashcan). I've been in the room for 10 minutes so far today and we've already had 2 of those boxes ticked from 3 different users, and (it's 09:05 UTC on a Thursday). Conversations do happen in the lobby, but it's not a water cooler vibe. To confirm, SE Lobby does get that stuff, but it's not nearly as frequently.

This shows a clear difference in the type of user that the two sites get. It might also be that the other room has more moderators often, and so the type of users that don't want to follow the rules are more quiet.

The problem of behaviour can also be shown in the volume of flags the rooms generate. I just had a look at the last ~100 flags on the SO and SE Chat servers. On SO 98/100 flags (since 2025-11-28) originated from the lobby. The 2 flags that didn't were one of Feeds, where a spam post was displayed in the Meta Room (as it was posted here on Meta), and the other a custom flag to unfreeze a room. So there no flags against user content on SO Chat in those flags.

I'm admittedly, as well, concerned that chat could end up in a position like it was before we had a regular mod (myself) in the lobby, and we see things like this again:

Conversely, on the SE Chat server, 43/99 flags originated from the lobby (since 2025-11-07). This is a considerably striking difference. SO Lobby gets a lot of flagged content, and a lot of it are legitimate flags. Opening the gates for people who we get in the lobby to start doing to same in other rooms, that are currently protected is a real concern. I'm (probably) one of the most active mods in chat, but the Lobby takes up a significant amount of my time; I don't have time to check all the rooms, and understand the history behind the troll users and work out the patterns. I can do that in the Lobby; it's one room. I recognise the repeat users, and so do the ROs; we can't do that when it's all siloed.

Speaking of problem users, to bang the drum again, (lack of) preservation of user information when an account is "re-rolled" is a serious issue. ROs don't have access to this information, but its the sole tool we moderators have to see what a user in Chat has been up to. If a user rerolls all the information goes right now, and we (mods) have no way to trace their prior behaviours. The problem is so bad that it even allows for kick and ban evasion. This wasn't an issue before as rerolling meant you had to get 20 reputation on your new account; that's not the case any more.

Many of the rooms that you are opening the gates for very likely don't want this. The Python Room, is likely a good example of this, however, some rooms also don't seen suitable; the Meta Room and SOCVR are good examples of that. With the gates open, however, as it stands these users likely don't have the powers to deal with them properly.

ROs don't have access to a users annotations; the history of the actions taken against a user's account (though kicks show up in an entirely different place). This means that that can't identify if a user is a repeat problem. It also means that they can't tell if they have been problematic in a different room. Kicks, also, don't escalate (as far as I'm aware). If a user gets kicked from several rooms (in a shortish?) amount of time, I don't believe this raises an auto-flag; we do get this when a single room has 3, 5, 7, etc kicks within 24 hours (unsurprising, these are common against the SO Lobby, but are not included in my prior flag analysis).

Something that's been discussed (not here) is the importance of the rooms having guidelines set up, so that users can follow them. I'm be blunt: this is naive at best... Users don't (can't?) read. The boxes of text with the room guidelines, which have a tick box next to then, might as well state "I didn't read any of this text." The first Guideline for the lobby states "This is an English-only chat room of people"*, yet the volume of non-English content and LLM prompts we get are far from low. Sure, this empowers the ROs to kick/ban the user(s), however, is that really the goal SO Inc want? Kicking users? Isn't that going to promote that "toxic" reputation SO has because it values quality over quantity?

The date that this is happening in January (which the mods were advised), is missing here. I don't know if that means it's been changed (based on feedback), but I still think that this going live anytime sooner than the end of January is too soon. There's a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure that the mods and ROs are prepared, both from a toolset and a mindset. Some rooms will need to prepare additional ROs, or at least know work out who they might want to when poop hits the fan. With the Christmas holidays, there's at least 1.5 weeks of dev time lost, so I wouldn't be surprised if between Friday and W/C 05 Jan 2026 no work occurs.

Mobile chat is also not an ideal place to curate/moderate. At present you only have the option to delete, kick, and flag. There's no move option and deletion is one message at a time. When you want to look at user details you end up in the desktop view on a mobile screen (it's not responsive like the main site), which isn't ideal. As a moderator, finding flagged content in the mobile pages is impossible; the rooms show that have x flags, but there's no UI within the room to find them. I, normally, have to open a room and then open a user profile or the rooms info (which takes you to desktop view), go to the mod tools, then the current flags page, and handle them from there. On Desktop I can do this all from the comfort of the room.

I suspect that many users on SO are using desktop, however, on SE that is very likely to be different; mobile chat curation/moderation must be improved. In truth, mobile chat requires parity of functionality of desktop.

I also want to look at this claim:

As it stands, currently 60% of all Lobby room participants have fewer than 20 reputation points

How many of these users actually contribute to chat? How many send nothing more than a "hi" message into chat and never return, or dump a large amount of (unformatted) code and don't respond when they are told that's not how chat works, or post non-English content and when that's removed don't say anything further?

Honestly, I likely have far more on this to say, but I should submit this post at some point (I've been writing for an hour now). I'll loop around when I have more stuff to add.

I think there's a couple of still unaddressed points from before.

If there are problems - what the mitigations are planned? There's a difference between moderating a single room and multiple rooms, and many of the problems might need a moderator. What happens if it's a empty room, and someone starts posting smut (this happened yesterday on the lobby) or there's a semi-organised attempt to troll (can't go into details, but if you're a CM, you either should know or could ask) - this also has happened in the lobby. Creating socks is also trivially easy.

Could we have a clearer answer on this first before pushing forward, or at least some awareness?

And while moderators/Room Owners(ROs) can handle things - SO has a total of ~20 mods and not all of them would be everywhere on chat. Maybe high rep users can handle some of the load. With the lobbies we managed to organise some communication ourselves via a mod/RO room. What mechanisms do y'all have in mind for a serverwide equivalent?

The 'original' plan for the lobbies was to have staff assistance - and since there was apparently never the time nor resources to, mods and community ended up self-organising. We don't have the critical mass for this (especially on SO with 'less' folks who have mod powers on chat). I'm not sure how good 'off' hours coverage on SO/chat would be either.

If we didn't get good support for 2 rooms through most of the original experiment, how're we to expect good or better support for this?

I still think that this should be a separate room type - and let rooms be set to that as an opt in. I also don't see a clear infrastructure for keeping this manageable for mods and higher rep users.

I have concerns about opening up the floodgates this wide. I have an alternate proposal at Let sites and room owners grant and constrain talk-in-chat privileges for users who don't have enough rep, which got some valuable feedback from Makyen.

Will 1-rep users continue to be unable to onebox images, as they are in the lobbies?

So, today was the first time I entered the lobby, to be greeted by a wall of text popup:

If you see a popup like that, with 3 required checkboxes, you don't think "Yes, let's read all of that". You click the checkboxes and get on with it, as you just want to chat.

I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of (1-rep) users who will see this popup won't read a word.

All this'll do is open the floodgates to users who are not invested in the site at all, into understaffed chatrooms.

This is a very poorly considered idea which shows just how little SO staff has been present in the SO lobby chat. Not that I blame them for not being there, the place is horrible! How about instead of making the rest of the chats equally horrible, we introduce a new feature like this:

feature-request
Give lobby room owners and diamond mods the ability to manually hand out the talk in chat privilege to people that seem actually interested in communicating with others. Instead of forcing them to get 20 rep in Q&A which would still be the other possible way to earn this privilege.

This would allow 1 rep users to join the chats they are actually interested in. The bar for manually handing out this privilege can be really low, like: "this person actually responds if you talk to them".

For example, the majority of all new users in the SE Lobby are there since they got dropped in the general chat from a specific site. And then they have very specific questions which they should probably rather just ask at the site they were coming from.

Similarly, users in the SO lobby that actually have a specific programming question are likely better off asking it in one of the major programming language chats.

This is a horrible idea. Have you guys actually looked at the SO lobby?

I was only active there the first few weeks before giving up, and it seems it’s only gotten worse since. There’s a bunch of non-English messages, bunch of random nonsense and just “Hi”s and “Can I ask about [ridiculously general category]”. There’s a bunch of spam, bunch of requests to aid in illegal activity/hacking. There’s almost nothing of value that shouldn’t have been posted as a Q&A instead.

So you want to bring this trash dump to the rest of chat? All you will get is a mass exodus of actual productive users from what is honestly a terrible chat system.

Also, what possible useful contribution do you think such users are going to make in, say, SOCVR, SOBotics, CV-PLS OQ, or any moderation room? If you don’t have enough rep to even flag, there are 0 useful things you can do. The only messages from those users will be users demanding someone reverse a perfectly correct moderation action on a post of theirs. This already happens with low (20-200) rep users in these rooms, but they are rare. It will be impossible to use chat rooms productively if we are exposed to a flood of people who have no idea what they are doing or are actively trying to cause harm.

Just to note - right now there's about 40 users listed as online and one offensive message thats been up for about half an hour.

This is a high traffic, high visibility room. I'd reiterate that we don't really have the tooling and human infrascture to deal with it.

The SO lobby is severely understaffed and SE mods are unable to moderate SO chats, despite being able to moderate all SE chats (even ones for sites they do not have diamond on). It would be extremely useful if mods had diamond in chat across the network without the artificial SE/SO/MSE segmentation there is now. The only way this experiment has any chance of success is if you empower your volunteer moderators with the tools they need to safeguard the community.

I am a moderator on https://crypto.stackexchange.com and am able to moderate all chats under the SE chat subdomain, but this artificial segmentation prevents me from moderating the SO lobby which, at the time of writing this, has five spam messages which I have flagged as spam and which have been up for over an hour. Had I a diamond on the SO chat subdomain as well, those messages would have been long gone. Fast action is particularly important given how many children seem to be joining the chats and how often personal information and off-site communication requests are solicited. It is vitally important that the chats are well-staffed.