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A couple of months ago someone in chat suggested that we change the 'Recent questions feed' from via a slide-down ticker overlay at the top of the room to as chat messages in the room.

The added advantage was that one could easily refer to a question by 'replying' to the chat bot. And we found out that this had the inconvenience of spamming the chat log, making actual posts harder to spot and breaking the flow of the conversations.

The messages of the chat bot can be ignored, but this causes the user to not see new questions.

And recently, someone else requested that we revert back to the old way, with a slide-down ticker overlay.

Unfortunately, we can't have both.

Now let's see what the community prefers.


As a small note, I'll wait about a week or so before doing the changes, if changes are needed, in order to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion.

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4 Answers 4

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A non-intrusive side list similar to the star board would be good - out of the way but still visible.

The old RSS-styled top-left pop-in was handy but was web-browersly bad because you had to be in the room at the time of the question being asked, and if you clicked Dismiss accidentally you couldn't get the list back.

The current implementation of having every new question appear in the chatlog is annoying - the font is too big, but really it drowns out the main purpose of a chatroom: user-typed messages. I go to the chatroom to chat. If I wanted to see what new questions are on the site, I'd visit GDSE directly and browse my favourite tags.

I don't mind new questions appearing on the chat page somewhere, but please, keep them separate from the chatlog.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ This is my vote. I'm "the one" who requested the old thing back. :) \$\endgroup\$
    – Almo Mod
    Feb 9, 2017 at 6:16
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    \$\begingroup\$ You say "A non-intrusive side list similar to the star board would be good - out of the way but still visible." but that's not an option, the options are the in-chat feedbot or the dismissable thing on the top-left pop-in which you also said you don't like. (This is to say, we have 2 options, ticker vs feedbot, you're advocating a 3rd option =p) \$\endgroup\$
    – Elva
    Feb 9, 2017 at 13:16
  • \$\begingroup\$ Good point Kevin. \$\endgroup\$
    – Almo Mod
    Feb 9, 2017 at 16:17
  • \$\begingroup\$ I take "I don't mind new questions appearing on the chat page somewhere, but please, keep them separate from the chatlog." as meaning "via a slide-down ticker overlay at the top of the room" for the context of this question! \$\endgroup\$
    – Vaillancourt Mod
    Feb 9, 2017 at 16:24
  • \$\begingroup\$ If there's no way to implement something new, I'd prefer the old ticker. \$\endgroup\$ Feb 9, 2017 at 22:37
  • \$\begingroup\$ No, there's no way, unfortunately. Well, there could be, but that would not be an immediate change: I guess that getting enough users wanting a new feature on meta.stackexchange.com would probably have the SE team add it. But the choices for the room owners are limited to the two options I have mentioned in the opening post. (There is a third one: nothing at all. :P) \$\endgroup\$
    – Vaillancourt Mod
    Feb 10, 2017 at 12:13
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I find the direct posts into the chat feed annoying and noisy for main-site questions. I would prefer to switch the main-site feed back to the slide-over that stayed in the upper-left of the screen.

I like the direct posts for meta questions, though. Those questions occur more rarely, right now, and tend to be of a nature that concerns everybody (and thus everybody in the chat). Whereas main-site questions are often restricted to a particularly subdomain and thus don't.

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Slide-down ticker overlay. It would be nice if we could have Chris's third option, but I don't think we get to request feature changes.

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Based on the 3 answers that wanted a less intrusive way to display new questions, and the opinion of all the users who voiced their opinion via an answer or a vote (at least 6), I have reverted the behaviour of the feeds to what it was before the change:

Message feeds:

New items from these feeds will be posted into the room like regular chat messages.

Ticker feeds

New items from these feeds will be shown via a slide-down ticker overlay that periodically appears at the top of the room, and will not be persisted.


Thanks to all of you who took the time to write an answer or to vote!

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