Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5275700-20190104170704

In 2019 we’ll be taking a fresh look at Community Central, giving a good deal of thought to what’s working well and what isn’t working well. Central is a place where users can get help from others, read news about Fandom, find useful information and socialize with one another.

As an experiment, we’re going to disable the Chat feature until at least the end of February. We would like to see what happens on Central without Chat enabled all of the time.

We’ll be interested to hear how all of you feel about this change as the time goes on. How do the social aspects of Community Central feel without Chat? The perspective of those who never used Chat will be just as interesting as the perspective of Chat regulars.

We do plan to continue with the weekly staff office hours on Thursdays at from 1-2pm Pacific time. Chat will be enabled during that hour and for a short time before and after. We will likely use an announcement to remind Community Central users about office hours.

I would like to stress that this change is an experiment. There are many opinions about Chat, both as a feature and its role here on Central. We encourage everyone to keep an open mind and see how things do or do not change on Central in the next two months. We’re excited to see what the learnings are!

For the duration of this experiment, some of the existing chat moderators will be changed to discussions moderators. 