Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-28428152-20180216061509/@comment-10502460-20180216194150

Cleric has stated that he will never bring back wiki chat. There is a discord server though that the admins don't go out of their way to advertise.

As James said, it was shut down because of drama, but that's really a big understatement that doesn't fully capture the reality of the cancer chat was for the wiki. It was more than a problem of just chat drama spilling over onto wiki. Chat became an entity that ended up superseding the wiki as the main focus of attention, and it was a massive time-sink for the admins to deal with while the wiki was neglected.

Officially, it was against the rules to start drama in chat or to bring drama from chat over to wiki. There were two major problems with this rule. One, it was of course not enforced well. The admins and non-chat staff were the only ones who cared about enforcing it, while the chat staff, rather than enforcing it, were very often the source of the problem. And two, all the drama from chat ended up being brought over to wiki anyway in sanctioned form because chat mods were so high turnover that there were constantly proposals to mod and de-mod users, and even for applications for non-staff positions, very often people would complain about something the applicant did or didn't do in chat. Top that all off with the fact that many users seemed to see being a chat mod as a stepping stone to rollback or admin, and it was just a massive clusterf#ck.

I wasn't active here then, but I was an admin on the SOG wiki and sometimes lurked here. All the chat drama made me want to have nothing to do with this wiki and had I known that chat had been permanently abolished in 2015, there's a good chance I would have become active here sooner than 2017. Also, over on SOG we sometimes had drama spill over from this wiki's chat onto our chat (our chat didn't have a drama problem because the wiki was so small. Now I'm sure they don't have a drama problem because the wiki is basically dead.)

The anecdote I always like to share when talking about chat is how my first week lurking on this wiki and sometimes ducking into chat or commenting on blogs, there was this big controversy over a recent decision to ban the word "c#nt" from chat and wiki. That pretty much told me everything I needed to know about chat. My first time joining this wiki's chat was in the middle of a big drama thing over a mod, and I soon learned that this was the default state of chat, not the exception.