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.