Contents
- The "Charter": Rationale and Purpose for creating topic-based chat rooms (see below).
- The "Index": a community wiki answer containing the list to active chat rooms that are topic based. A quick reference that can be updated by everyone as topics, rooms, and hosts are added/removed/edited.
- The "Welcome Message": A community wiki answer containing instruction to new visitors. From comments in the main site, we can direct new visitors by simply pasting this link.
- The "Guide": A community wiki answer containing the guide for chat room hosts to update the Index.
Rationale of the chat rooms
I have noticed that there are 1-2 dozen topics that new users have more difficulties than others. These are usually topics that can easily turn a question into:
- opinion-based
- requiring scope
- off topic
- philosophical / sociological
- truth questions
One solution is to direct these new users to a topic-based chat rooms where they can receive clarity about the topic as well as help from other users to construct a good question that meets C.SE standard.
The ongoing discussion in the topic-based chat room can also generate new questions.
Purpose of the chat rooms
Help new users to construct questions within that topic to meet C.SE standard. Badly formed questions by new users can then easily be guided in one of these topic-based chat room rather than cluttering comments.
Help new users to have more clarity of the topic.
Direct spillover discussion of a question or an answer to the appropriate chatroom rather than these 2 extremes:
- individual chat rooms created for an answer (good discussions on the topic are then scattered and hard to find)
- Upper Room (too many topics discussed in one room, making it hard to find the relevant topic)
Content-based discussion can then happen in these chat rooms rather than cluttering comments.
Ongoing discussion of the topic by regular users interested in that topic, which can generate new questions (as I often see happening).
We don't try to list all Christian topics
The list of topics is purposely limited only for topics that tend to generate a lot of confusion / disagreement / debate, which then hurt the objectivity of the questions.