Chat room owners can now establish room guidelines

Question 1

tl;dr --

Chat room owners can now establish guidelines for specific chat rooms
Guidelines will display in conjunction with the site Code of Conduct
This is also a great time to review and update Chat room descriptions
Chat room owners are being notified about this update this week, so rooms can be ready for the release of new Chat onboarding modals in mid-November (Nov 19).

As part of ongoing work to improve the Chat experience on Stack Exchange, it’s now possible to establish guidelines for specific chat rooms. In mid-November, the guidelines will start being shown to users who enter a Chat room.

How and when are the guidelines shown to chat users?

Reference the images below. Upon their first entry to the room, participants will see:

A modal with general chat onboarding information, and links to theChat FAQ and networkCode of Conduct. A user will need to check the box in order to proceed. This modal will be labeled according to whatever Stack Exchange site the chat room is parented to.
If room-specific guidelines are established, a second modal will appear detailing those. A user will need to acknowledge the individual guidelines before being able to proceed.
- The room description is also shown at the top of this modal. The description is another place for room-specific onboarding content.
The modals will display upon a user’s first entry into the Chat room (after the onboarding modals are released). The guidelines can be accessed at any time from the Chat room’s info area. When accessed that way, only the specific room’s guidelines are displayed.

The first onboarding modal, showing general information about Chat and linking to the Code of Conduct

The second onboarding modal, showing the Chat room’s description and guidelines

The link to the Chat room’s guidelines, accessible at any time.

Where do room owners set up guidelines?

Updated Chat room creation and editing screens are now available. Guidelines can be established as part of the creation process and edited by room owners at any time. Rooms you own can be found by going to your chat profile. Reference the images below.

The new functionality allows for three titled guidelines, or perhaps three sections of guidelines, to optimize space within the modal. MiniMarkdown (like in Chat itself) is supported.

The updated chat room creation screen, with guideline creation included

The updated Chat room editing screen, with the same fields available

What should be in the guidelines?

Guidelines can be as simple as reinforcing general expectations around behavior and civil discourse. They might detail what topics are permitted, how to handle certain types of content, or even answer common questions.

Here are a couple of examples of guidelines that have been established in the past for specific rooms.

The PHP chat room on Stack Overflow hasguidelines that use a Do’s and Don’ts format
ThePhysics h Bar guidelines (also featured in one of the example images)

The structure of the new guidelines display may require combining some guidelines into a single item.

Questions and feedback

We expect to release the updated Chat onboarding later this month, and there will be a new post when we do. We'll monitor feedback on this post through November 19, 2025.

What are guidelines that you think work well? Feel free to provideexamples from other network rooms.
What are specific situations that might be helped by havingguidelines available?

Question 2

Is it safe to assume that diamond moderators have RO powers and can therefore create/update these guidelines?

Question 3

@Snow Yeah, I was wondering that too. It doesn't explicitlysay, but it's usually the case.

Question 4

Not that I’d overrule an RO, I’m too respectfull for that.

Question 5

@Snow Yes, IIRC mods have full control over a room if they choose to exercise it. Even if they didn't have access to some RO feature, theycan add themselves as a RO and then have access.

Question 6

does the thing get a scrollbar if it doesn't otherwise fit on the user's screen-height?

Question 7

how does the mobile chat interface link back to the guidelines? I don't think the mobile and desktop chats have full feature parity (I think mobile doesn't support message history for example?) but I assume mobile will be be able to check back on the guidelines any time as well?

Question 8

Anyone who finds themselves being kicked from a room should see these screens again once their suspension has expired.

This is because by definition they’ve broken the CoC or the room specific guidelines and should therefore be reminded. Every single time they get kicked, they need to be reminded.

Question 9

Probably with a little message/reminder at the top of the screen, saying something like "You were recently kicked from this room. Please review these guidelines and make sure you follow them in the future." (Someone better than me at words can probably come up with better phrasing.) Basically, something like the reminder shown in the Flag modal if a previous flag from you was recently declined.

Question 10

I’d be happy with the screens above being shown again on the basis these users could use re-onboarding.

Question 11

The modals will display upon a user’s first entry into the Chat room [...]

I see why this is useful, as you want people to know the rules (I wonder if you took inspirationfrom Discord?); however, will this impactChatExchange?

Specifically, will this mean that for an account to post in a room via ChatExchange, the maintainer will need to sign in and manually go through that UI for each room the bot posts in?

If a bot only posts in one or two rooms, this isn't terrible, but for example, SmokeDetector posts inmore than just a few rooms.

Question 12

Someone can probably test this on one of the two rooms by just deleting the HTML elements and checking to see if it just disabling chat on the front-end (or even less obtrusively blocking users) until the checkbox is checked, or if it is a server-side check for whether they have agreed to ToS. If it's a server-side check, then my guess is it will affect API-based access (the server will not allow users to submit chat messages unless ToS have been agreed to). If it is client-side, then API-based messaging would not be affected.

Question 13

Is it possible to notify the room of guideline changes using an audit message?

Maybe a short message posted by the room owner/moderator who made the change orStack Exchange.

Example:

"This room's guidelines has been updated by (username), please view the changes at [link]"

or if the audit message is to be posted by the user who made the change:

"This room's guidelines has been updated, please view the changes at [link]"

Question 14

Speaking just for myself (I'm not working on this initiative), I agree that this could be useful. It might make sense for this to work similarly to how the Feeds user already notes changes to the room name or description, when the room is frozen/unfrozen or deleted/undeleted, or someone is added as a Room Owner.

Question 15

I'm not sure if this bug was already present before this change, but I noticed there's a grammatical problem / confusing phrase on the 'Edit chat room' page (emphasis mine):

Room description
This description will showon right rail of the chat room page and can be edited at any time. It will also be shown to users when they enter the chat room for the first time.

'on the right rail' would be grammatically correct, but I've never seen part of a webpage being referred to as a rail. I'd propose something like 'on the top right', though either option may be incorrect for mobile chat.

Question 16

Good feedback. I used to work in advertising and I think that's where I picked up that jargon-y phrase. Copy can definitely be improved there - will think of some better ways to describe it!

Question 17

@phoebe Terminology usually used here on Stack is typically "right menu" or just "right-hand side". The only section to the right of the actual chat message section that is ever referenced regularly is the place where starred messages appear, called the starboard. So anything that makes sense thematically and is intuitive would probably work, phrasing-wise.

Question 18

If things go well - we'll hopefully have folks who've been away from chat explore chat once more and they might need a refresher. It would be useful to show these guidelines to people who've been away for say a year.

Also, what would be the experience for userswithout less than 20 reputation, in a non lobby room?

Question 19

I know that the go-live date is only 2 weeks away (Nov 19), but is there a way for us to see what the "Room Guidelines" page will look like before that date, with actual content for my own room, rather than a mockup?

For example, I have added 3 guidelines tothis room but there is no way to see a preview of the "Room Guidelines" page, as not even the link to that page is visible.

Question 20

Didn't they already show us the link?i.sstatic.net/KniThzpG.png

Question 21

@Otakuwu If you go tothat UX chat room info page, the Guidelines link is nowhere to be seen. So the image is just a mockup. But my question is about seeing a preview of guidelinesfor my own room, not what the link looks like.

Question 22

Please expand the character limit for the new onboarding textboxes to something like 10,000 or in that realm. 1,000 is way too short for some rooms.

Question 23

1000 characters is already long enough that many people will skim it without reading fully. At 10000, the only people who would read that are the people who wouldn't be causing problems in the first place.

Question 24

Rooms with complex rules should be able to link to those rules and include an abridged version in the modal. This request is actually an example of why I question the creation of this feature for all rooms.

Question 25

@TheGuywithTheHat Hosting websites costs real money and if we can migrate content from an external website to Stack's domain that's a real impact for us, and it's better to show exhaustive rules natively in the chat domain rather than trying to send users off to some other site to read rules for a chatroom on Stack Overflow. If users don't read rules that's on them; it's not my concern.

Question 26

@TylerH The rules wouldn't need to be on an external site though. You could make a Bookmark for it and link to that, create a separate chatroom just for the rules, etc. No need to host your own site for this.

Question 27

You could also host the rules on the site's meta since rooms are generally tied to a specific site... or keep them in a Page on GH for projects that might be there - which doesn't charge for public Pages as far as I'm aware?

Question 28

@TylerH if 5% of people don't read the rules, that's a problem with those people. If 95% of people don't read the rules, that's a problem with the rules.

Snow 2,6971 gold badge9 silver badges35 bronze badges · Answer 1 · 2025-11-05 19:03:47Z

12

Anyone who finds themselves being kicked from a room should see these screens again once their suspension has expired.

This is because by definition they’ve broken the CoC or the room specific guidelines and should therefore be reminded. Every single time they get kicked, they need to be reminded.

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answered6 hours ago

Snow

2,6971 gold badge9 silver badges35 bronze badges

2

Probably with a little message/reminder at the top of the screen, saying something like "You were recently kicked from this room. Please review these guidelines and make sure you follow them in the future." (Someone better than me at words can probably come up with better phrasing.) Basically, something like the reminder shown in the Flag modal if a previous flag from you was recently declined.
V2Blast
– V2BlastStaffMod
2025-11-05 20:29:00 +00:00
Commented4 hours ago
I’d be happy with the screens above being shown again on the basis these users could use re-onboarding.
Snow
– Snow
2025-11-05 20:30:25 +00:00
Commented4 hours ago

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cocomac 20.6k7 gold badges47 silver badges108 bronze badges · Answer 2 · 2025-11-05 17:53:03Z