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On the main page right now is a link to a chat room:

In which the relative merits of Word and LaTeX are discussed.

I don't like to see that here. I think that we've stayed fairly civil on the relative merits of different systems: our task is to sing the praises of TeX, not to be nasty about other stuff. The etiquette that I've seen so far has been along the lines of: "Of course we think that TeX is the best thing since sliced bread, didn't you read the sign on the door? But if you're nice to us, we'll be nice to you and we'll show you the error of your ways by example, not by preaching.".

What I've read so far of that discussion does not follow that etiquette. Indeed, what I've read so far is a pretty pointless discussion. Moreover, the room seems to be closed so no new discussion can take place, and it doesn't seem to have been started by anyone from this site.

So why is it linked from our main page as if it were anything to do with or endorsed by us?

Please remove it!

(Note added in edit: It occurs to me that it's not for the people here to fix this one so I've cross-posted at meta: Why do we have a link to some bizarre chat room on the main page of tex.stackexchange.com?)

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  • It is ok here - we keep an eye on the child metas. (:
    – Rebecca Chernoff
    Mar 7, 2011 at 8:19
  • @Rebecca: Nice to know. What are the correct incantations to bring something to your attention, by the way? Is it the bug tag?
    – Andrew Stacey
    Mar 7, 2011 at 9:10
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    [status-completed] for the "frozen room being advertised" thing
    – balpha StaffMod
    Mar 7, 2011 at 16:06

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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As far as the question goes "What kind of room is okay to create", that's up to you as a community to decide, so I'm not going to comment on that.

But you're right, the fact that this room shows up at all even though it's frozen – that should indeed not happen. This was actually two different bugs at once, and will be fixed in the next build.

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    I agree on the first part, except in that no-one from this community created that room.
    – Andrew Stacey
    Mar 7, 2011 at 8:38
  • @AndrewStacey: Yeah, my point is: The first part isn't a technical problem, but more of a social one.
    – balpha StaffMod
    Mar 7, 2011 at 8:54
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    And my point is that that first part is irrelevant, unless you wish to start discussing the wider issue of how easy it is to assign chat rooms to different sites (so if I start a flame war on American versus English, can I get it reassigned to English-SX?)
    – Andrew Stacey
    Mar 7, 2011 at 9:07
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This answer is crossposted from the MSO crosspost of this question. I may not update this copy of the answer.

It was a discussion about TeX and LaTeX (and Word), so I reassigned it after the fact to TeX and LaTeX, rather than Gaming, on grounds of topicality. I agree it was unpleasant, but that's no ground for "censorship."

(I did ask for reassignment during the chatting itself, but my moderator flag has been ignored.)

Since the room is frozen, it'll fade away soon enough. Chat more to make it go away :)

Oh, additionally. Site policy does not need apply to chat. Bad subjective content, such as polls, asking for opinion or just relaxed exchange of ideas is fine there. It also is unenforceable, because there's no way of preventing somebody from taking part into TeX chatrooms and TeX chatrooms alone, short of a chat.stackexchange-wide chat ban. That would be inappropriate.

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  • There's no need to have two different comment discussions on the same post, so if you wish to comment please do so on the original MSO post.
    – badp
    Mar 7, 2011 at 8:25

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