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If there is some information related to this site, which you consider important enough to share with other users, the best way is probably to use meta. But I can imagine some situations when meta seems to be overkill - the thing you want to say is not important enough to deserve a thread on meta. I think that a chatroom specialized to one area could do the job.

For example, we used to have a chatroom called Jury Duty, which was devoted to closing/reopening questions and similar stuff. (The room is frozen for inactivity now, so if we decide to use something like this, we would need to post at least one dummy post once a week if there are no messages in the room.)

I'll also give several examples in my answer bellow, which is devoted to tagging and retagging only.

What I would consider advantages of this approach:

  • People which are interested in the topic to which the chatroom is devoted (e.g. tagging, closing) only have to check the transcript for the chatroom and they do not need monitor meta. (You don't even have to login into chat, if you only want to read what was written in the room and you don't want to post anything.)
  • I find this better than to post this in main chatroom; since the main chatroom is quite lively and this would get lost among plenty of other stuff.

My questions are:

  • Do you consider this a good idea?
  • I have already mentioned tagging and closing, can you think of other purposes, where this would be useful.

I apologize for asking two rather independent questions in the same post, but I do not think this was worth having two threads.

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Recently, I have been reasonably active in a battle against windmills trying to constrain the "Unanswered questions" queue.

I believe it can be worthwhile to have a chatroom devoted to coordinating such efforts, e.g.:

  • Linking to questions where a "comment answerer" was requested to post an answer;
  • Linking to questions where a (CW) answer has been compiled, usually based on the comments;
  • Perhaps calling for bounties on difficult, yet low-exposure questions;
  • Discussing what is to be done to non-trivial cases, such as questions which were crossposted to MathOverflow;
  • Bringing questions (cq. their non-upvoted answers) to the attention of fellow "crusaders" with specific expertise;

to name just a few possibilities.


This suggestion arises because I witness the Unanswered queue growing towards 25k, which I think leaves some room for improvement (because, as pointed out in this thread, many questions shouldn't actually be in this queue).


Edit: The room is instated: The Crusade of Answers.

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A room named Tagging was created recently by Eugene.

Although this was not exactly the original purpose of this room, I propose we could use that room for tag-related stuff. E.g. messages of this type:

  • Could you suggest tag for this question?
  • I would like to make this retag, but I am not sure, what is your opinion?
  • I've retagged 3 questions from this tag to that tag.
  • There's a new tag called .... Do we really need it?

I am not sure whether you will agree with me, but I consider these things as examples of posts which are not important enough for bringing up at meta (at least in some instances), but feedback from other users might be useful.

Perhaps short explanation is appropriate for the third bullet: Various retagging efforts are going on, e.g. removing some tags - several such things were suggested at this thread. Another example - not that long ago tag was created and it was added to some older questions. Of course we want to avoid filing the front page with old questions, sometimes some users complained about this. So it would be useful to know, for example, that 5 questions have been bumped by rettaging during the last hour and so it would be good not to make new retags for a while.

In the past, we have used Jury Duty for this purpose, a few examples of tag-related posts: 1 2 3 4

Tagging has also been discussed in the main chatroom, again a few examples: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Added later: Something like this could be particularly useful if a large retagging effort is going on. (Like when we were removing algebra tag.) Mass retagging is typically done by several users and some kind of coordination might be useful.

For example, if I see a post in the chatroom saying: "I have retagged some questions in , at the moment there are 394 questions tagged ," then I know at least when some retagging was done and, by comparing the number 394 with the number of questions at the main site, I can see how fast the retagging is going even when some users don't mention their retaggings in the chatroom. (E.g. when I see that there are 333 questions in this tag at the moment, I know that about 60 questions were retagged since the last message in the chatroom. If I see that 60 questions were retagged in 48 hours, which is quite a large number, I will not pile on by bumping more old questions.)

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I can imagine messages of this type in chatroom/noticeboard devoted to closing questions:

  • I think this question should be closed/reopen. (CFV).
  • I think this question was closed with incorrect reason, could we reopen it and then close it with the reason:..... (Things like these happened in the past; I believe in such cases CFV was made either in comments, or in main chatroom. I am not sure if I saw a meta post like this.)

We also had a chatroom called Jury Duty, which was created for this purpose. If we decide this would be useful, we can create a new room like that. (Or the old one can be unfrozen - as I've learned recently, moderators can do such things.)

Also I am not entirely sure to which extent something like this is needed, but of course you can show your opinion on this simply by upvoting this post - if you thinks such rooms should be created; or downvoting this post - if you don't want such room.
(I believe that closing questions works quite fine even now; usually it is sufficient that users which come to question see that there are already some close votes and based on that they can check and add a vote, if they find it appropriate. Occasionally people post a CFV message in the main chatroom. Also 10k+ users see recent closure votes using moderator tools, so they can easily monitor the question which are needed to be closed.)

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