What is this?
It's a real time, persistent collaborative chat for the
Stack Overflow
community. Only members of
Stack Overflow with at least
20
reputation may talk here – but all the conversations
are free, open, and public to read by anyone.
What can we chat about?
This site is an extension of
Stack Overflow, so discussion should more or less revolve around the same topics you'd find at
Stack Overflow
— but in an interactive, less strictly Q&A focused way. Do have fun, but please keep it professional and
always
be respectful of your fellow community members.
All chat occurs in a
room
; each room has a defined topic.
When talking in a room, it's polite to stay
roughly
on topic for the room, as defined by the room owners. If you
find yourself consistently veering into other topics, you should consider taking it to another room.
How do I join or log in?
You must be a registered user of Stack Overflow
to participate in chat. If you are logged in
there
, you will automatically be logged in
here
.
Your display name and
gravatar
are also inherited from Stack Overflow.
Do I have to be nice?
Yes. We expect community members to treat each other with respect … even when they don't deserve it.
This site is collectively moderated by the community through participatory flagging. If your chat messages are repeatedly
being flagged by your peers you might find yourself muted, banned, or – in extreme cases – your
Stack Overflow reputation may be negatively affected.
If you see an inappropriate, spam, or offensive chat message, please use the hover menu at the far right of each chat message
to flag it. This will draw it to the attention of the community moderators.
All conversations here are
public
, and they are logged and licensed under the same
cc-wiki
license as Stack Overflow.
How do I talk?
First,
enter a chat room
— they're all public by default. You may enter and read the conversation
in any room, but you may not talk until you earn
20
reputation.
To talk, enter your message in the chat input area at the bottom of the room and pressing
enter
or clicking the
send button.
If you make a mistake when entering a message, press the
↑
up arrow to edit your last message … or
press
esc
to cancel editing. You have
120
seconds to edit your messages. All edited messages have a small edit
indicator.
It's also possible to insert images in chat. Simply paste the URL to the image on a line all by itself and press
enter
or click the send button. If the image is on your computer, click the upload button to share the image through
our partner imgur.com
— the URL to the newly uploaded image will automatically be inserted into chat on your
behalf.
Chat messages initially appear
in this color
as they are being sent to the server.
Once received by the server, they change to
this color
. Once everything is final, they
change to
the normal chat message color
.
If you're wondering what to say to your fellow community members, we hear there are some pretty amazing
easter eggs
in chat … maybe they know how to trigger them?
We support a limited subset of Markdown styling in chat, similar to comment formatting on Stack Overflow:
*italic* or _italic_
**bold** or __bold__
`code`
---strikeout---
[link text](https://example.com "optional title")
Some links will be automatically inlined
if posted on a single line by themselves
, such as:
- Stack Exchange questions,
answers, and users
- Chat messages and rooms
- Images
- Wikipedia pages
|
- Amazon products
- Youtube videos
- Twitter messages
- Github gists
|
We call this "oneboxing". For example, entering the following in chat on a line by itself …
http://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/1678/what-are-the-reasons-for-and-against-wearing-a-bicycle-helmet
… will produce a onebox for that link, like so:
In site-specific rooms, you can also use the syntax
[tag:yourtagname]
to indicate (and link to) an existing tag of your choosing.
How do I know when someone is talking?
There is a configurable sound trigger in every room, at the top of the page.
Sounds can be set to occur only when you are mentioned, for new messages on visible rooms, for new messages on
any
room you're in … or not at all.
To get another user's attention, mention them – type
@
and then the first part of their name. Your mention
will be highlighted on their screen –
@someone
. This will happen even if they are in a different
room. Note that you can only mention
@someone
who has been in the room at some point. If you
need to
invite
someone to your room, do it from the user's chat profile page or from the user card that pops up when
you click on their avatar in a chat room.
When someone mentions
you
, a counter will appear on the avatar next to your input box, showing how often you were
mentioned.
Clicking on this number will highlight the messages that addressed you. To remove the counter without highlighting the replies,
enter a message in the chat, or simply press
esc
.
When typing
@
and the first character of a name, you should see a popup allowing you to quickly auto-complete the desired user.
Press
tab
to cycle between the available users, or
esc
to cancel the auto-complete. You don't
have
to use the auto-complete - you can just type the name manually, as long as you enter
at least
the first three characters
of their name, and remove spaces; so
@fre
and
@FredSimpson
are
both
valid ways of mentioning
a user called "Fred Simpson", but
@f
is not.
Can I mute someone?
Occasionally, you simply need to ignore someone - or a busy feed. To hide a user's posts
temporarily
, click on their
avatar to see their user card …
… and select "hide posts". To see them again, reload the page. Or, you can ignore them
permanently
by clicking
"ignore this user". You can manage your ignores on the preferences tab on your profile.
How do I star or pin things? And why?
You can star both rooms and messages by clicking the star next to the respective item.
Starred rooms can be accessed on the
favorite tab
of the rooms page. There are lots of
rooms, so star the ones you like for quick access later.
Feel free to star any message you feel is particularly useful or worthy of summarizing in the transcript. You can star a
maximum of
20
messages per room per day. Messages can be starred by anyone in
the room; the more stars, the more interesting the message to that room.
Starred messages appear in the room sidebar, ordered by number of stars and last time of starring. (Room owners can also
pin
messages, which permanently affixes them to the top of the room sidebar for up to 14
days.) The room sidebar is intended to be a collaboratively created mini-timeline of interesting room events for people who
don't have time to read the entire chat transcript for that particular room.
Can I share a link to a specific message? Or range of messages?
Sure; if you click the menu button against any message, you get the "permalink" option:
This gives you a link directly to that message, highlighting that message for clarity. If you want to create a link to a
group
of
messages, you can bookmark a block of conversation by choosing "create new bookmark" from the room menu:
Then just follow the simple on-screen instructions to select the messages you want to include. You need at least
100 reputation to create a new bookmark.
Who's here in the room with me?
Every time you talk in a room (and when you enter a room for the first time), your avatar goes to full brightness and sorts
to the top of the avatar stack for that room.
The longer you are quiet and don't talk, the more ghostly and transparent your avatar will become. Thus, the more bright
avatars you see in a room, the more populated and active it is.
However, as long as you have at least one browser window open to the chat, you will never
leave
a room. To actively
leave a room, click the leave link. If you close all instances of chat in your browser, you will passively time out of all
rooms after
10
minutes. We do recommend clicking the leave link in rooms you
don't plan to monitor, to better communicate your away status to fellow users in that room.
Each room has
owners
, who can change various room settings and transfer ownership to other users.
To become a room owner, you must be granted ownership of a room by an existing owner, or create a new room of your own –
in which case you become its owner. Creating a new room requires
100
reputation;
creating a room where only named users can talk requires
1000
reputation.
Wondering who is who? Moderators are displayed in
color
, room owners in
italics
.
Automatic appointment of room owners
If a reasonably active room has no owner, or none of the owners have been in the room for a certain time, a new owner may be automatically
appointed, to ensure that there's somebody who can administrate.
The system will pick the room's most active user in this case and make them owner; this is announced via an automatic message.
If the user does not want to be room owner, they can revoke ownership from themselves by going to the access tab on
the room info page and setting their status back to “no special access”. Before they do this, they should
find another active user to take over and grant them ownership on the same page (otherwise, they may soon be
auto-appointed again).
There are not a lot of responsibilites connected to room ownership, just a few extra permissions: The owner can add and remove RSS feeds being posted
into the room, change room name and description, and similar things.
If you feel that somebody inappropriate has been appointed as a room owner, or is abusing the privilege, you can bring
it to the attention of a moderator. Moderators can revoke room ownership.
Where have I read to?
If you have chat
open
but we don't think you've seen new messages, the system adds a dotted line like this:
Anything below that
should
be new to you. The page title also reflects the number of new messages, and indicates
when you have been mentioned by adding a * to this number.
If you are away for a longer period, your
user profile
allows you to get a summarized view of messages in your rooms, and in particular any place where you were
@mentioned
.
Why is my avatar and user name not showing correctly?
If you are a new user with very little reputation, then instead of the avatar you usually have on Stack Overflow you may see the non-descript shape shown on the left and a default display name.
Because we have had issues with offensive avatars and user names in the past, we hide new users' avatars and names in chat until they have earned some reputation on Stack Overflow.
Will these rooms exist forever?
Rooms will exist indefinitely, so long as there is at least one person actively talking in the room. A room is considered
worth retaining if it has more than
15
messages by at least
2
users.
Rooms not worth retaining which are inactive for
7
days will be
deleted
. Rooms worth retaining which are inactive for
14
days will be
frozen
. Frozen rooms do not allow any new messages to be sent, and are not shown in the default room
list to prevent cluttering the rooms interface.
Why don't you guys just use IRC, man?
We're trying to build a system
better
and
easier to use
than IRC, that is native to modern web browsers. Will
we support
XMPP
?
We're not sure yet
. In the meantime, there is a
nascent community project
to create an IRC interface to our chat.
Fascinating! But I have a question about …
This is still a work in progress.
If you'd like to test out chat without bugging anyone, do so in the
Sandbox room
.
We're listening. With your help, we will continue to
add more awesome!
Congratulations on making it to the bottom of this FAQ! Why not
head over to the rooms list
and see
what topics look interesting?