A user has proposed effectively(*) splitting our site's chat room into on- and off- topic sub-rooms. A grassroots attempt to populate or otherwise prove obvious utility of the room was given about two weeks or so to show something for itself.

I'm posting this question to get a feeling from the community as a whole about the idea in order to help determine whether or not we should do it.

Note that if we do split the chat room:

• we'll probably make the existing one of on-topic room, as it is the target of [chat] quicklinks all around the site, most of which should be for on-topic purposes
• we'll normalize permission settings across both rooms as much as possible
• the same rules for what is appropriate off-topic conversation will still apply; this is not a follow-up experiment to our first "almost-anything-goes" style of chatroom split that went so poorly

If we don't split the chat room:

• we'll just convert the experimental room into a regular "conversation between X and Y" room (this means renaming it) to preserve its discussion in the archives

Please post your thoughts!

(*) in this particular case I say "effectively" primarily due to the chosen name of the room; irrespective of the intent behind creating the room, it looks like and acts like an on-topic-only room for the site. This is still a question I feel we should have documented on meta regardless, as this comes up more often than I'd frankly like it to come up.