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It's been an issue for a while, brand new users who need help can't get it because their questions are off topic for the site, and they can't gain reputation because they're new to game dev (so find it hard to answer questions) and they can't ask the questions they want (because they're off topic). These users could become productive members of the site if we can get them started here by helping them in chat.

We have a work-around for the 20 reputation requirement, but it's pretty clunky. It would be great if a moderator or high-rep user could just go to the new user's profile an press a button.

Clicking the "Allow access to Chat" button in their game dev profile could just allow them access to chat in the game dev main chat room. This button would essentially automate the steps for the workaround applied to the main chat room.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Yes. This. Because we don't have this, we often just send users outside the SE network instead. \$\endgroup\$
    – user1430
    Jan 29, 2015 at 17:28

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I like the spirit of the idea, solving the ever-present problem of new users who need chat and can't have it. Most of the rest of my post is purely devil's advocacy in the name of taking care to do it well (if at all).

I think implementation details will be hard:

  1. It becomes a by-invitation feature, which creates a member/nonmember club. It's contrary to every other privilege in SE. I don't think this a huge impact issue, because obviously you can just earn the rep the normal way, but I can imagine a new complaint of "Why won't anybody approve my 1-rep chat?"
  2. What rep level gets this power? We already have a dearth of users at the high-end, but allowing this at a low level creates all kinds of other issues. One unscrupulous empowered user with 1k rep, and we'll see swarms of noise in the chat. And related, what would you do with such a user excessively granting this power to new users?
  3. What do you do with users who ought not have been given the privilege, but received it anyway? Is there a separate, permanent "override/reverse" of this privilege available at an even higher rep level, or would that be reserved for diamonds? Or closer to 10k, at least?

Yeah!

So, in the interest of resolving this problems, I would suggest making the feature a limited-duration privilege. You can grant anyone power to chat...for a while. 30min, 2hours, etc. More than enough time to (help) solve their question-unworthy problem. Or at least, enough time to teach them how to earn reputation.

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