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Just a friendly community-service message:

I have noticed many extended discussions happening in the comments to some posts (and to be fair, SE's automated Mod tools have raised a few flags on their own). While I can certainly take part of the blame (I have myself contributed to a few endless comment threads in the past), I should still point out that this use of comments is not encouraged.

As much as possible, when your comment has potential for becoming "controversial" or leading to long discussions (I think by SE standards, anything more than one or two back-and-forth is "long"), please consider using Chat rooms!

Chat rooms work practically the same as comments: participants do not need to be logged in at all time, conversations are saved and can be resumed at any time, when a person logs back in. Depending on the type of conversation, you can either use the main public chat room for JLU or create your own room (and keep it private or make it public).

SE provides you with tools to easily migrate a comment conversation to Chat (don't forget to delete previous comments that are no longer necessary on the entry), but don't hesitate to flag a comment thread if you'd like moderator help to move it to chat.

In addition to the "SE rule" aspect of all this, I think it might have a nice impact on the social aspect of JLU (even though this is not its main design, I think it's clear there is a sort of informal community of JLU users: chat rooms are designed specifically to encourage this aspect)...

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Well, if there's a way to link the comment to the chat room so that people who would like to reply automatically see the discussion went somewhere else, and if the chat is persistent (in which case, it's really a bad name, maybe worse than "community wiki").

I must say that the SE format, to me, is very far from being the right place for discussing the fine points of language. As a user of forums for that, I believe that discussion is really necessary, as well as formatting and so on.

Anyway…

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  • I agree there is much to be improved in terms of UI (a lot of it has to do with specific choices that are debatable, but usually carefully thought out)... Chat is 1) persistent 2) usable on-and-off (i.e. it will keep the conversation alive even if you are offline). Also: take note of the @login syntax which will ping any user from a chat...
    – Dave
    Aug 26, 2011 at 4:44
  • Ok, - how do we chattify the huge brawl of <japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/2819/…>? - how do we notify a group of people or everyone of the creation of a chatroom? (For example, I have some discussion on JLU which isn't a question, and is thus not for [meta])
    – Axioplase
    Aug 31, 2011 at 5:24
  • as mentioned above, if you use the '@' syntax, people will receive a notification with a link to your chat (whether in the main room or a dedicated room).
    – Dave
    Aug 31, 2011 at 6:18
  • @Dave: I know, but (though I haven't tried) I think it's limited to one person per message, and it does not allow broadcast (to draw every one's attention)
    – Axioplase
    Aug 31, 2011 at 8:47
  • I don't think it's limited to one person (and even if it was: just send a salve of one-liners with each person's name). I don't think broadcast would be desirable in any case.
    – Dave
    Aug 31, 2011 at 12:27

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