106 posts shown.
mistyhound94 said:I guess you can't really decide if the chat should close based on just one person. I suspect there are way more people who want to keep the chat alive than those who want it shut down. If it closes, this site will become one of those rare PDFs without a general chat. Honestly, the chat belongs here because that's how people actually bonded and met up.
Also, I’ve always argued that for those repeatedly breaking rules and being abusive, there should be a simple fix: either a warning or a ban-by-ban approach until they earn a permanent one. I know things are handled a bit more leniently here, but I don't think that achieves anything. That chat used to move over to the PDF Offtopic section because of how angry the former mods—or rather, "modettes"—were, but then it migrated back to the US and people came back to write. There have always been troublemakers, but closing the chat is just the easiest way for you to avoid dealing with the whining of forum members reporting posts or sliding into DMs. But again, I don't think that's the solution.
Just to add another point, Meadow closed the meetup thread, claiming it was because the location and time were secret, and she wouldn't reopen it until that changed. What is the logic there? Is it really normal for a forum member organizing a get-together at their own house to publicly post their location and compromise their privacy? Sure, someone could pass details through other channels, but no sane person would post their home address publicly on a thread. To build on that, the people who organized the follow-up meetup actually managed to meet recently by coordinating on the US WhatsApp and handling the specifics via DM. I didn't see the whole thing, but an opportunity popped up and now the thread is dead because of the whim of the moderator I mentioned earlier. People wanted to hang out, and I honestly don't see any other way they could have coordinated such a meeting if they hadn't discussed it on the chat first; you certainly aren't going to discuss whether people want to play board games on the main forums. The chat serves a purpose and always will, but the rules need to be clearly defined so that when those aggressive trolls show up to cause trouble, they are properly punished or removed for a long time. This isn't the first time people have fought, and I doubt it'll be the last. If threads were closed every time people argued, the PDF Politics section would have been shut down ages ago.
Finally, there’s already another chat on the US site anyway. The older crowd and those who used the general chat will likely migrate there (as some already have), and then the veterans will probably complain about why everyone is hanging out there instead.
If you truly believe the US doesn't need a chat, then just lock both the general one and the veteran one. If you think a chat has no place on the US at all, fine. But time and again, whether a chat is removed or not, it always finds its way back to the US. Many people met through it, which was a major plus for this site; without the chat, I highly doubt many of these meetups would have even happened. I know my post won't change the decision, but that's just my opinion, coming from someone who has been in that chat for nearly 10 years.
Sophia Thomas7 said:Thanks for confirming that we don't even need this chat. 🙂
Joshua Watson37 said:This might be a weird one, but it's just some random thought I had.
So, we know our neighbors in Asia have those almond-shaped eyes...
And it makes me wonder—what do Chinese or Japanese people actually look like right when they wake up?
Most of us Americans and non-Asians have rounder eyes, so you can totally tell if we're sleepy just by how much we're squinting, but Asians don't really deal with that same thing..
You get what I mean?