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Open chat room

It was nice back in the day, I really miss it. We can still report the spamers and idiots and contribute with the mods that way, ain't it a possibility?
Thibault: There is no way around it. People want to socialize, and communicate. Chess is interaction between people. They want to see an active chat on the front page with many different channels.

Assuming the developers (You, who else?) want to improve and attract more chess players to lichess.org, then that's the BIG feature missing at the moment. It's essential.

I know you've tried different solutions in the past. I can imagine the chat being just one big toothache for the people running this site, requiring constant attention to nurse, and moderate with all the drama which will inevitably ensue.

But unfortunately it's necessary.

So what to do about it? Here are my suggestions No doubt all these have occurred to you, but if you're looking for confirmation, here goes:

If it's possible, add a multi-channel chat with the possibility of creating chat-rooms (look to free chess server for inspiration) to the right of the center window. Place the three buttons Play, Play with a Friend and Play With Machine above the center window make them slightly smaller, or you could also turn them into smaller self-explanatory icons above the center window. These three buttons have been a fixture on the site for a long time and I assume there is a reason for this. You probably feel these are important for the elegant, simple intuitive, right down to business look of the site. But they take up a valuable big space.

Then delegate responsibility. I guess you don't want to deal with chat issues. Deputize someone you trust to be responsible for chat and have that person delegate further responsibility to ops for main channels.

Don't worry too much about moderating smaller user-created chat rooms, let the people creating those rooms get ops.

I think chat is something you have to solve eventually and I can't think of any other answer than to delegate the responsibility somehow. There are many regulars here now. Several people seem dependable and capable.

Regarding chat moderation. Use some auto-function to mute people using profanities with increasing time punishment added for repeating offenders, rather than banning them.

Those are my two cents worth. Thanks for a wonderful site, you're all doing a great job!

You're right, it's a giant toothache.

We've experimented with chats in the past, it failed. There's currently much bigger things to be worked on, so it will still be a while before another chat system is considered.

I know I'd personally like for a better chat system, but these things take time and effort.
Is the reason for not having an open chat room that there will be too many rude comments? Or is the problem technical?

Honestly I dont understand why rude comments should be an argument against an open chat room. If you dont like the rude comments, you can always ignore them.

Chesscube has open chat rooms, and I think it contributes to the quality of that site.

Lat5

I don't know for sure, but I guess the staff is reluctant to add a chat because it is inescapably time-consuming to moderate and police. It's not only about rude comments. That sounds innocuous. Trolls, spammers, flooders, racists and psychos will require attention. You can't have an unmoderated chat-- if for no other reason-- because it doesn't look good. It puts a lot of people off if there is a constant stream of racist slurs and swastikas and idiots spamming incomprehensible crap. So the drama of the chat will require a team of chat ops. I think that's the problem which needs to be solved. It's not technical it's about finding mature, trustworthy and fair-minded people willing to be ops. It's not easy to be ops and the lure of taking out your frustration by abusing your op powers is constantly there--which is counterproductive and will result in a massive increase of complaint mails and forum posts about the dick ops..etc.

I propose the free market sort it out.

Firstly, having a chat feature like facebooks - where you can chat in real time to your friends using tabs on the side/bottom rather than keep having to go to the inbox would be great.

Secondly, a communal chat could, and should, be organised through the teams. These team chats would be moderated by the team leader, and other people he could op. As there are so many teams, the best ran, most mature chats would be favoured over the poorly ran, immature chats. This would mean that the moderators of the site wouldn't have to administer the chats. Use an auto filter for everyday insults, to make people at least be creative.

I agree with other posters that chess is inherently a sociable activity.
Rumeye said: "You can't have an unmoderated chat-- if for no other reason-- because it doesn't look good."

Maybe it doesn´t look good, but I don´t think people will stop using lichess just because the chat room is full of rude comments. If there is an unmoderated chat room, nobody will force you to use it.

Has there been an unmoderated chat room on lichess before? What did people write in there? Was the chat room worthless for normal users of the site?

My 2 cents:
Group chat rooms are great for community building, but I can understand lichess' hesitation to build them (for reasons mentioned in this thread and many others).
I think a lot of the problems could largely be addressed with some of these ideas:
1. (client side and possibly server side) flood prevention - just set a threshold (e.g. 1 sent message per 2 seconds... any more are not relayed to server) . Best way is to not even let the flooder know they are being blocked - so they flood away merrily without even knowing they are annoying nobody.
2. account age and games played threshold before posting (e.g. 2 weeks and 20 standard games or 40 bullet games) - like forums - but maybe even more restrictive. Someone banned will have to spend a lot of time on the site just to repeat their annoying chat... stops the types who get banned and come back immediately to start causing crap. Users can still read chat while they cannot post.
3. (client side and possibly server side... or just have clients also filter incoming chat) swear protection. English words likely would suffice, but could add most common other ones over time. Again not even letting them know it is happening - they submit "f** you" - they SEE "f** you" - nobody else does. Rest just see "you". Troll is happy. Viewers are happy. Of course, users invariably get more and more creative with their swearing ... so see 4.
4. Like/dislike +/- thumbs up/down comment buttons - kind of like reddit - below a threshold comments are hidden. A bad user could quickly be found out by how many negatives they have. Also, some self-moderation - to write stuff that people like... even add to their profile (can even measure "chat reputation" in a graph - people will want to protect their rep). Maybe once a dislike threshold is reached, again they think they are being seen, but they are actually hidden. So they can continue being jerks, and nobody cares... and they don't create a new account. Such mutes could be time based (5 mins, 1 day, month, permanent) - e.g. any time you reach X negs in 1 min, you are muted for 5 mins)... and if you reach Y negs, you are permanently muted.
5. Keep chat to sub-pages - i.e. not on home page where it can annoy people who just want to play - like this forum, lichess could have chat section.

I think, overall, does it really matter if there is some bad chat? The worst will get users banned.... and most people can survive seeing some bad or mean chat. Reddit survives with total and utter jerks writing comments that last even longer than a chat room, lichess could too.
And users who don't like what they see can always stop going to the chat section (if it is not in your face). I am wary of any system that uses moderators for chat (starting with egos and abuse) so if something like this ever happened, hopefully would be community driven (like/dislike etc)... but, of course, beyond all of the above, some light touch moderation would also work.

As long as there are humans, there is also abusing. Filters are useless, you can avoid them by typing eg the "n-word" by replacing i with 1 and e with 3.

And with like/dislike... people will give thumbs down, i guarantee you, for saying things that they don't agree with, like "i prefer d4". Or anything else that they just don't like for some reason. And also, people are just going to start posting brainless stuff just for the sake of getting thumbs ups (remember what youtube comment sections used to be like?)

Though imo limiting the chats for people with X number of games or something like that is a good idea, but not necessarily effective.

I'd support the idea of having the possibility to have private chat rooms in which there would be an option to voteban. But Lat5 was completely right there... if you don't like something, just ignore it. (I don't like the 3d pieces but i don't come here to complain about them, i just ignore them and don't use them. My opinion on chesspiece designs isn't an absolute universal fact, neither is anyone else's opinion on comments and messages one.)
#26:

"These team chats would be moderated by the team leader, and other people he could op." similar to what I suggested, although site moderators - ones that deal with things currently - should have moderation abilities even in the communal rooms.

I think this is similar to Chesscube where full moderators have moderation privileges globally, even in private chat rooms. Team leaders would be given full moderation abilities in their room (kick, mute, ban [for a certain time limit, of course], and their chosen lieutenant moderator will be granted temporary moderation abilities.

#28:

I support your points (all but one) - and I especially like number 3. I would amend, however, that moderators can see the muted text for the purposes of determining how frequent and how *offending* his/her comments are. Muted text viewed by moderators will be in a different font colour or something.

I disagree with the "I am wary of any system that uses moderators for chat" simply because a chat without moderation, well, is anarchy. The trolls that posted in the forums before "you need an account to use the forums" were pretty darn bad.

For the egos and abuse, I agree that could be present, but I'd suggest that all "chat room moderator actions" are recorded in a log. The moderator that acted, what action s/he took, on whom, for how long and for what reason should all be logged for a certain period of time. Other moderators can read the log and see if there's abuse present.

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All in all, chat adds some spice; lichess'll become even hotter.

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