Hello all.

I have an idea for an option for players to be able to chat with other players in the main room.

This could be helpful for those who want to coordinate tables or say hi to people who log onto the main room.

I understand that some people may not be fond of this option, so I also feel it would be helpful if there was some way in which this feature could be toggled on and off.

Hello,
normally, this feature is available in most other languages already, but it is disabled in English.

It is not disabled for any technical reasons, but rather because it was extremely difficult to moderate.
The English Playroom is a little special, in the sense that everybody who does not have Playroom in their native language comes to English by default. As a result, that main room chat was full of people speaking in their own language.
It's a little useless to have a chat where you can't understand half of the messages, especially if you are a newcomer who just installed and opened the Playroom...

This of course wasn't even the biggest issue. It is even more annoying when people start using famous words which are known to crash popular speech synthesizers such as Eloquence. Unlike on a free table where maybe you and a group of friends have a bit of fun with this sometimes, on the main room, this can't be allowed under any circumstances at all, because any player that opens the Playroom suddenly risks having their synthesizer crashed.

As a consequence, it would be necessary for a staff member to basically always be present and hand out bans/warnings in realtime.

There were a couple of attempts to re-enable the main room chat in English several years ago. None of them were really successful without causing many issues.

Now, what I am about to say below is purely my user opinion, and it doesn't represent the opinion of the helpers team in any way:
I personally think the concept of the main room chat is nice, but it isn't really that useful in practice. I have a bit of experience with this in other languages, and in many cases, people either write in the main room by mistake when they meant to send a private message, or they are writing in the main room to reach somebody who blocked them because they notice that the person is in the main room. The most useful part of that chat would probably be something like, "Hey people, anybody wants to play Jass?", but I don't think that usecase is so common. Too bad, because I would use it for that purpose myself...

The only time the main room chat is actually fun is when there is some kind of a special event. For example sometimes in French there are interesting conversations when a new game is about to come out or comes out, and in English, we had a small event for Christmas of 2022 when the main room chat was briefly enabled, that also worked out quite well.
Such events can be considered from time to time, this probably requires the discussion of the entire team, and I'm certainly not going to make any decisions on my own, but it is probably the best compromise between no main room chat at all and main room chat always enabled.

Perhaps the entire community is more peaceful and there are less troublemakers than in 2016/17, and maybe spam isn't as big of an issue as it was back then, so it might be worth retrying that experiment.

Thanks for your question in any case, and hopefully you can understand the reasoning brought up here.

I agree about the lack of blind people who use bad words or disrupt screen readers, as well as spam, day after day.
For example, by comparing the current situation of the blind community in general to 2020, we will find that things are going very positively these days.
It is also possible to filter the most common words that cause disruption to screen readers or bad words. This filter disables the user chat feature in the main room and sends the filtered message to the helpers to look into whether it is by mistake or something similar. This will help reduce the helpers interference regarding the chat In the main room.

Great explanation, Nikola. I don't knew reasons for disable the mainroom chat in the english room, but I understand now. This function allso is disabled in the spanish room at some years ago. I don't know exactly it is so because I'm not loged here, but I think that some users was a few an idiots and they happen some problems with other ussers and the helpers decided disable mainroom chat. But again, I'm not sure.

Hello,

In fact the only language where it is allowed is in French currently.

We give the choice to helpers whether or not chat is allowed in the main room, and most of them have decided to don't allow it, or allowed it for a while and then went back, mostly for the reasons already given by Nikola. Languages where there are no helpers at all or not enough have also chat disabled on the main room, since there is nobody or not enough people to actively check what's going on.

We can try again the experience again if the helpers of a given language so desire, but we haven't received such wishes since quite a long time now.

I think that's not necessary anyways

it will get a lot spammy if mostly there are more than 100 ppl hear and it will be difficult to chat + we have free tables to talk about different topics.

One possible solution for a main room chat is for there to be a dedicated window for the main room chat itself, with the option to open the chat dialog in the main menu. In fact I think chats and private messages in general should be given totally separate windows from regular game and table messages.

Hello,
I suggest getting used to the history views feature, it would help you a lot.

As a reminder, you can press Alt+left or right arrows to switch between the different views, and Alt+a number to switch right away to a specific view.
For example, Alt+3 will switch to the discussions view. Then, page up and down will navigate only between chats, private messages and table messages.
You can configure which types of messages will be in each view by opening options/reading and appearance/views. There you can even create, delete or reorder existing views. The default views are quite fine for most people, but I did make a couple of small customizations, such as removing messages about who entered and left the Playroom from the discussion related views (they are the messages of the friends channel).

It's in my opinion much better than any kind of separate windows, with that approach, chatting and playing a game at the same time would become much less convenient.