Why is the general discussion chat room not the first in the list of site chat rooms?

Question

When I go to chat via the SE logo I arrive at the chat room list of the particular stack I am on, the SFF chat room list in our case.

So far so good, but how is the order in which they are displayed derived?

For me it looks like this:

Does the placement change with latest addition? Because then you have to actively search for your favourite chatroom every time.

Regardless though, shouldn't the main general discussion room for the site as a whole (i.e. Restaurant), not be "pinned" at the top spot, then followed by either the specific community room(s) first, and then the discussion chats for specific fandoms (sorted either by most recent activity or - better yet - alphabetically) or the other way around.

Having the continuation of comment thread chat rooms at the end, i get, since they are of interest only to a limited number of people.

Or maybe I'm just not using this feature correctly?

Related: Why doesn't the "visit chat" link go straight to the chat room?

Answer 1

It's because you're on the "Active" tab, where the chat rooms are sorted by activity. You can see that the Quill's last activity was 6 minutes ago, and the Restaurant's 5 hours ago.

There are other tabs there - "Event" (I assume it sorts the rooms by the last event time), "People" (sorts by the number of people, descending), and "Created" (creation date, descending).

As for your request - SE chat doesn't seem to have a "main room" functionality. It appears that a main room is expected to be the most active room, so it'd always appear on top. That's not always the case after the Great Mos Purge, but that's another story.

Answer 2

Seems to be status-by-design.

You have the "active" box ticked. This means the first room to show will be the one with the most recent activity.

Keep in mind that many other SE sites do not even have more than one chat room.