Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-24376429-20140412002355/@comment-10950063-20140413045200

The Bitter Cold wrote:

It's a matter of convenience. You could leave a message on someone's talk page and wait for them to get around to replying, or you can just stop by the chat, ask a question, shoot the breeze, and be on your way. The fact that certain members abuse the chat by using it to seek attention is sad, but removing a tool that can be used responsibly because you're - and I use this term broadly - afraid of these persons is arguably sadder. Or, you can stop by chat, ask a question, get ignored because everyone's talking about jacking off and leave.

Then, we could try to make a rule that says you can't talk about jacking off and everyone screams about how stupid that is.

After that, when we talk about the problems chat causes people will say it's our fault for not doing anything about it.

The fact is chat causes a shitload of problems. Some, like that little pedophile incident that happened in the past and nobody likes to talk about or users extolling the virtues of cutting themselves, are very serious. Some are just annoying. Some are things that can't be fixed because of the chat's social dynamic.

I still think this is a really important blog post: http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Lady-warrior/Maybe_I%27m_just_a_prude...

Again, for the small fraction of visitors (I don't give a shit if they don't have accounts) that use chat, it generates an amazing amount of issues. Why is it worth keeping? Because it's a little more convenient? Because some people enjoy it? People have had more than enough chances to use it responsibly.

Trying to crack down and make them use it responsibly is going to piss people off. And more issues arise. Either way, we piss people off, but one way stops problems. The other creates more.

If you want to think that we're afraid of chat, then go for it, Bitter.