Making use of Hinduism chatroom

Question

Since the time this site came, we haven't seen much of engagement of users in chatroom. I personally feel chatroom is good place where many things can be discussed and sorted out. Of course a continuous moderation of chat is also needed by Room Owners in case the conversation gets heated or goes off topic. Couple of good reasons why I think it can be a good place if a lot of users join the chat:

1. If users from different topic preference will join the chat, they can see the feeds of newly posted questions. And can track their topic queue.

2. We can also discuss with others before answering any question or posting any question, that will help in making the post quality better.

3. Post treatment will improve; for example if some question/answer needed to be hammered or edited or anything else, it can be handled quickly.

4. Users involvement will be better. Currently most of the users starts jumping into heated discussion under question/answer post, which can be avoided.

For making Hinduism chatroom a better place. We also added set of rules to be followed when discussing in chat, which is pinned in starred messages board. The link to the chat rules has other useful details too like Chat formatting guide and How a new user can get started etc. We are working to improve chat rules link in order to make it more useful for newbies and regular users as well.

So here I am looking for advice as to how we can improve and make full use of chatroom and bring more users to the chatroom.

Answer 1

I want to add that chat can also be used for casual community discussions. These discussions do help a lot in growing as a community - we understand each other. This is what had helped us to grow from private to earlier beta stage of this site.

We used to have lot of discussions on asking questions, answering questions & helping each other to answer questions, proposing new on-topic / off-topic posts, debating and cooling ourselves off later.

You can check the earlier discussions just to get the gist (if you have time :P)

I am sure this will help to graduate this site as well.

Answer 2

I've been a part of WhatsApp chat group on religion created by batch mates and alumni, and without moderation it very soon reduced to a cesspool of vitriol. I think there is scope for such a chatroom (with moderators in place) as

1. It helps in more fast paced discussion. In HSE, answers are to be complete in themselves. In chat, outcome may be known at the end of discussion

2. Discussions can result in high quality questions in HSE. Many a times, a gap emerges from a discussion which is best resolved by answer from legitimate source.

One point to consider -

If and when chatroom takes off then we need to formulate a way to capture the discussions in a Q&A format on HSE.