I just had an extended discussion with a new user about how to write good answers and how to earn rep etc. which had to take place in the comments section of a post. About 15-20 comments were exchanged, and these were irrelevant to the post, which is against SE policy (therefore now that our discussion is over I have removed my comments and flagged theirs as chatty/obsolete).
It would have been much easier if I could have just started a chat room for us, and in general it could be good to be able to have this function so we can bring in new users to discuss these sorts of things. They come up fairly regularly come up and often have to be discussed at great length in comment sections.
I tried to start a side room for us but the minimum rep to be able to chat is 20. Obviously the minimum rep has an important function, e.g. reducing the ability for trolling etc.. However, it would be really useful if one could set up a chat room, invite a specific user and allow that person to access that specific side room regardless of their rep. In the room access section of the info pages for chat rooms it is possible to grant explicit write access, but this did not work in this case because the user had under 20 rep.
My questions:
- What are people's thoughts on allowing access to side rooms (not the main chat room) by invite only for <20 rep users?
- Are there problems that could be raised which I haven't considered here?
Summary of what I think would work:
- Allow existing users to create additional rooms just as they do know.
- Allow the room owners to grant invited access to <20 rep users.
- In cases where the user starts causing problems, which the <20 rep boundary is there to help prevent, or the discussion with that specific user can be considered closed, access can/should be revoked through the same pathway.
- The invited access would only be valid for the specific side room, not the main Biosphere chat.
Justification:
- I think it would help to reduce the frequency of extensive off topic chats in the comments section and give a better route to help new users integrate.
