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Some folks here hang around in the chat room pretty well like Snailboat, Cerbeus and myself. So I guess it becomes problematic for any of us to know when a new question is posted to the site. I saw such a feature in Movies.SE chat room where a bot Movie-Reel displays the question in the chat room as soon as a new question is posted. I suggest creating a similar bot here who would carry out the same function here. This feature will help people like us to keep track of new questions, if posted. So I request the SE employees and mods here to think about implementing it.

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  • I used to like that, but since the main site has acquired live refresh I haven't found the chat feed as useful.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Oct 7, 2013 at 11:16
  • Why not just have a separate tab open in your browser: one for chat, the other for the main site's question links ? Though chat may get busy, I doubt it's so chatty that you can't just flip over to the other tab and hit refresh. (Say, you could have chat, main, and meta all tabbed at once for a full dose of ell :))
    – Howard Pautz
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 0:53

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There's nothing for us to implement here – all that the auto-posting of new questions to the chat room requires is adding the recent questions RSS feed to the room's feeds section.

This can be done by any room owner. The ELL chat room currently doesn't have any explicit owners, but any moderator is implicitly an owner and as such can a) add feeds, and b) appoint other users as explicit room owners.

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There's a way to do this, as balpha pointed out (I'm not exactly sure of each step in the process, but I think I could figure it out). So if this is something the community wants, it shouldn't be hard to do.

I don't know that it's a very good idea though. I forget exactly who I was talking to, but some time ago I was talking to moderators of other sites, and they said that the question feed killed their chat room. They said that whenever a question popped up it killed the flow of discussion, because the ratio of questions to messages wasn't low enough. We get a decent amount of questions, and so I think this has a good chance of happening to us. The Teacher's Lounge has a feed thingy that posts any MSO questions re: moderator-tools and that doesn't kill discussion, but that's not every question being posted, just a special subset.

So, doing this is relatively easy. Whether or not we should is another question. (Alternately there's the cool little popup thingy that shows up in the ELU room that goes away after a minute; maybe we should find out how they do that?) If the community wants to go forward with either of these options I'd be happy to investigate.

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    It all depends from how much questions are asked on the main site. The "popup thingy" still needs to be dismissed, and if the questions are too much, it takes up more space in the chat room. I did enable it for questions asked on Drupal Answers for its chat, and it is not that much boring, even when leaving the popup open for long time. I think Drupal Answers gets more questions than ELL. Let's say some users could find it boring, and I don't see any way to disable for single users (e.g. a setting users can use not to see those popups).
    – avpaderno
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 2:02
  • Well this is not a emergency and necessary things you know. :-) I personally do not link opening multiple tabs, so while I am chatting, it is easy for me to keep track of new question. Anyway thanks for sharing your thought.
    – Mistu4u
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 3:52

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