User blog:PyroNacht/Basic Chat Etiquette

''I shouldn't have to be writing this, in all honesty. I really should not have to be writing this. I honestly like chat, as I have met some of my dearest friends here: and I want to keep liking chat. So this may as well as be a basic foundation of what bothers me in the chat that I've been witnessing lately. Some of this will come off as common sense.''

What Is Chat's Purpose?

 * I covered in a previous blog the changes I had witnessed following the renewal of chat guidelines by Brandon Rhea earlier this month. I'm not going to reiterate everything I said in the blog, but quite essentially, I was rather impressed with how the new guidelines seemed to knock sense into the minds of many. Central Chat was no longer a needlessly-social chat, but rather a helpful chat for those users who strayed off their home Wiki seeking aid.


 * However, there's still a couple of things (some of these might appear as newer problems? Perhaps so.) that I would like to emphasize are frustrating to other users and why.

PM-Begging

 * Personally, I am not a chatty person when it comes to people. I will be 100% honest- I am not fond of forming connections with many users, primarily because I do not have the time nor patience to invest my trust in everybody. At most, I'm willing to do idle chit-chat on occasion or talk to somebody who needs a listening ear, but I don't do random PM's. The amount of people begging for another person to private message them is beyond frustrating. It's clogging up chat, and quite frankly, my mind.

Role-playing

 * Role-playing appears to still be a huge issue here. Many people usually enter chat with role-playing, typically to say "is sad" or whatnot. As a very closed-off emotionally person, I do not wish to see people complaining about things that they're upset about in the main chat. It's lowering the general good atmosphere of chat, and can be easily resolved by doing pretty much anything except complaining about it. I'm not an expert on psychology, but I find that getting up and doing something is far more productive than sitting and dwelling.

Excessive Promotion

 * I understand that a lot of people are frustrated by the newer chat-room guidelines and have since moved to more social Wikis. However, constantly spamming the link in main chat is not going to enable others to feel obligated to join. There are many other ways to promote a Wiki, such as posting a well-written blog on Community Central. Somebody wise once said: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insane.

In Conclusion

 * Please be mindful of the other users in Chat. Some of us like our solitude and don't enjoy PMing people 24/7.