Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-30113641-20190303143811/@comment-5811199-20190303233537

Hi, I thought I'd share my personal thoughts on Chat's closure.

I've found that the last two months have been a huge burden lifted from the moderators here, and we've seen the most productive talks in years during Office Hours. Because chat was limited to a bit over an hour, there were less people joining in being bored and feeling the need to troll, and more people joining in to ask questions and get useful help.

If anything, admins and moderators would love to moderate a chat that was consistently at the level of Staff Office Hours in the last two months. I have joined in on the few I could make, and I enjoyed my experience.

Before we closed chat, there was very little help coming from both moderators and from users in chat - most questions were swallowed by social talk and there was rarely a time when there was a constructive conversation in CC. It was also not a healthy atmosphere at times - with some bad and questionable messages coming from various users.

TheKorraFanatic wrote: Per Akumi. CCC had a lot of social issues, but none of them were problems that couldn't be overcome by diligent moderation, a strong chat policy ...

It's not reasonable for any wiki admin group to make over 2000 bans and kicks in a month - by comparison, TDL and Roleplay had a combined 400 chat bans over the two months CC was closed. For CC last year, around 30-40% of these bans were non-infinite bans - so, not sockpuppets, these bans aren't just a click of a button but an active check against our chat guidelines with some requiring mod consensus. This sort of moderation requirement is unprecedented in any wiki, and this would need a very large moderation effort that wasn't possible for CC to keep up.

To put this in more perspective, I put together this graph at the very start of this year.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/intcommunity/images/5/55/Chatstats-bans-monthly.png

Alex.sapre wrote: However, even though staff promised an "experiment" to resolve our issues with moderation, closing chat did nothing to help the problem. We didn't like how the moderators acted, so staff remove chat altogether so the moderator role doesn't matter anymore?

This was not the purpose of the experiment - we just wanted to see what sort of interactions we would see in chat during Office Hours, and what sort of impact it would have on the wiki itself. And I think this experiment showed us that there was a substantial impact to the quality of chat.