General chat room: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Question

After Mos Eisley was nuked from orbit, I've created a new room with a new name:

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

• The Name
  The name comes from The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which features a restaurant of the same name.
  An earlier name came from William Gibson's The Bridge trilogy, but had some unfortunate connotations.

  I'm open to a change of name; I don't own it. But that is (now) a separate question.

Thinking Twice

Shog9 told us to think twice about creating a new chat room, which I did. I think a chat room is essential to the community. Both for discussing issues on topic on the Stack, and for shooting the breeze to build the community.

Rules

• Be nice
  This goes without saying. Also, see this post about chat.
• What happened in Mos Eisley, stays in Mos Eisley.
  Let's not discuss Mos Eisley; we have meta for that. Let's move on.

Room settings

• Owners
  I became a room owner through creating the room. I've added the old room owners, except the mods who don't need to be room owners to do their thing.
• Feeds
  The usual feeds (new questions on main site and meta) apply.
  I've also added feeds for xkcd and At Wit's End (a comic by regular Jack. B. Nimble) to a add a bit of levity. These are infrequent enough (xkcd is updated thrice a week, At Wit's End less frequently) to not be disruptive.

Answer 1

I hope the new chat room succeeds. It's a great way for users to discuss the site or just have a relaxing chat with each other.

In order for the new chat room to succeed, though, users will have to learn lessons from the failure of Mos Eisley and be mindful of the existing guidelines regarding chat etiquette. Some of those guidelines to keep in mind include:

• The Be Nice policy applies to chat. It also applies to people who are not SE users.
• You can talk about contentious issues (like politics), but if you do make sure you respect those who disagree with you.
• If you're not sure that what you are about to post is appropriate then don't post it. That goes for whether you are posting your own words, an image, a link, etc.
• Flag messages you think are inappropriate. If the message is truly inappropriate then it will probably be deleted; if not then the flag will probably be dismissed. Validated flags help teach the room's users what isn't appropriate so that they can avoid posting flag-worthy content in the future. In the long run it will help the room avoid a bad reputation like Mos Eisley's.
• Assume flags are raised in good faith. Non-regulars of Mos Eisley have expressed a reluctance to flag messages (e.g. here) out of fear of the regulars. An us-versus-them mentality against non-regulars can allow a room's culture to become unwelcoming and inappropriate.

• Also accept the actions of moderators as done in good faith. Failure to do so is a large part of why Mos Eisley was deleted:

  When yesterday's little episode crossed my desk, what dismayed me wasn't the off-color jokes - it was the fact that they continued after flags were raised, continued after a moderator stepped in to handle the flags, continued after the moderator attempted to reason with those who remained in the room.

  _{Shog9 ♦}

  You are welcome to question a moderator's decision, ask for a second opinion, etc., but you must do so respectfully and with a genuine desire to avoid further problems.

• The previous point applies for actions taken by moderators from other sites on the network -- the system gives them just as much authority to act in a scifi chat room as a scifi moderator, since a scifi moderator may not be available. Failure to do this also contributed to Mos Eisley's deletion because the moderator who responded to the flags yesterday was not a scifi mod (none of the scifi mods were online at the time). The scifi moderators will support the actions of moderators from other sites, except in the rare case in which they have genuinely made a mistake.

Additional useful reading: toward a philosophy of chat.

Answer 2

I wasn't in Mos Eisley at the time of it being frozen so I may be wrong about this but I feel a big problem with Mos was its attitude towards flagging. Many users insulted flaggers as cowards and had an us-and-them mentality about flaggers. This led to me (and possibly other users) seeing content that possibly should have been flagged but not flagging because through worry that flagging would make me not a proper member of the rooms community. I suspect this led to many users pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable and people being afraid to complain when these users went too far leading to a spiral of ever worsening behaviour.

If we start a new chat room, which I am in favour of, I think we need to stop seeing flaggers as anonymous users trying to cause trouble and start seeing flags as an essential safety net to keep the site on the right side of good because if we don't then soon users will begin going too far again and next time we might not be allowed a new site chat room.

Answer 3

TBH, I'd give it a while. Emotions are heated, people are mad - I'd recommend at the very least, to wait and see what your moderators say (those lovely folks you elected) before starting a new room.

I'd like to start by saying I'm an avid user of chat. There's only one organic user who chats more than me (and of course, Smokey, but Smokey essentially shouldn't count). I understand how important chat is to the social fabric of the site - I help run a main site chatroom that's considered by some to be pretty well behaved.

I also spent two days in your chatroom. And while a handful of folk are the most noticeable, I got the impression the room was going to be extremely difficult to moderate. Yeah, there's a few specific toxic folks, occasionally moderators coming in and being mad at you guys, but at the end of the day, its the room-wide culture. Things went too far because no one went "Hey, this isn't fine", or if they did, they weren't listened to. I mean, with multiple flag events over time, there had to be a tipping point.

And I've found that even minor incidents on chat are pretty messy for moderators to handle. This is... huge.

So guys, please spare a moment for your moderators. They'll likely be looking into it, and trying to contain the damage and working out how best to balance the interests of the folk involved.

Answer 4

I think that SFF can survive without a primary chat room for a week without significant negative repercussions.... it hasn't even been 12 hours. I strongly recommend that this room be closed in deference to Shog's edict and that a new one should not be opened until this community has a discussion regarding how to moderate their chat community more effectively.

This event was not just two bad eggs. It was the culmination of months of struggle to keep Mos in line with the "be nice" mantra. The very fact that no one in Mos at the time thought that posting NSFW content was flag worthy until it devolved into a will you/won't you discussion of physically assaulting an actress (though gender is irrelevant) - and even then, it was flagged by moderators from other sites - shows that the users in Mos at the time, more numerous than only two, are not consistently capable of judging when content crosses the line.

Closing the room is a signal to this site that there is an infection. If you can't treat it with medicine, it needs to be cut off entirely.

Answer 5

_{Just my 2 knuts.}

People posting here might not necessarily know me, but I think I can call myself a Mos regular of the past few (~6) months - apparently, to a point where people were even willing to elect me a room owner.

I've been in Mos every day (including weekends and national holidays) for some months now, from approximately 8:30 to 0:00 UTC +3 - meaning I was there when a good portion of messages was posted.

I've also been in the new room, and SQB was very kind to carry over our RO-ship from Mos, along with all the feeds (and some new ones).

The discussion so far has been peaceful, with an occasional person asking "what happened to M#s?", at which point they were redirected to meta.

No sign of heated emotions, and certainly no one is getting mad; I, however, agree that certain changes should be made. Setting the whole be nice thing aside, I'm willing to paraphrase something I saw on a main meta post regarding chat:

When taken out of context and displayed away from Stack Exchange, a chatroom transcript should not compromise the community.

Which, as I see it, means that a chatroom conversation should not be dependent on context to verify whether it is offensive or not. I should disclaim that I have been a proponent of context-aware flagging - here and here - so I'm going to change my own view right now and say that a message must not rely on context to be non-offensive.

• It's a simple litmus test to implement - if you think your message may be deemed offensive by a person who knows nothing of the room, or the site, or even Stack Exchange - consider again if you wish to post it in its current state.

  • That would also solve the problem of anonymous flagging which prompted my defense of context-based flag review.

I don't think waiting a weekend or a week is going to solve anything - I'm going to guess now that some if not most of the users were not here when the storm broke, and are just as baffled at this as I was this morning. Telling people to "stay put" for some time as the dust settles down is not a viable solution - I appreciate the openness and input from everyone here, but I support the opinion that this site needs a third place. There may be some Stacks that haven't got one, but we're not those stacks.

For me, it's been very pleasant to be in Mos - whatever "pattern" or "tendency" there was, I must have missed it. Either way, I think having a fresh start with this room is the best we can do.

Shutting it down now, and waiting for an officially sanctioned reboot is only going to make us - us, as in the people who were moderating Mos - more incompetent. Given the quality of the talk so far, I think we're in for a good start.

Answer 6

On Thinking Twice

I am of course, only a fraction of the community. Also, I didn't consult the community nor did I take long to think twice, instead deciding on a name and creating the chat room.

The reason for this is that I view a chat room essential to the community of a stack. So I feel that in order to think twice and to consult the community, we need a chat room first.
Yes, we might have used a discussion on meta. Some posts are up there concerning the freeze of Mos Eisley and I expect some more — both questions and answers. But in my opinion, we need the informal channel of a chat room as well.

So I created a new chat room in order to preserve the community we already have.