How can we improve the participation of subject experts and enthusiastic physics students in chat?

Question

I don't use the main site much, but I have been a regular participant on Physics SE's main chat: The h Bar, for the past two years. Lately, I have been noticing a drastic drop in the number of subject experts i.e. grad students and professional physicists, visiting the chat. I know that some of the former regulars (including professional physicists and grad students) have either shifted to the software industry or have gotten busier with real-life. Of course, I'm hoping the best for them! At the same time, the main chat seems a bit different these days, and we don't get as many interesting physics conversations; simply because there are not enough active chat users. Perhaps, another issue is that many of the main site users are not even aware that chat exists!

A few quick fixes I could think of are:

• Create a community advertisement for chat. The 2019 version of community promotion ads should be up soon.

• Resurrect the bi-weekly chat sessions. We could again start conducting AMAs from time to time.

• Almost every time I peep into chat these days, I see a couple of new users asking easily Google-able or sometimes nonsensical homework-y questions, with terrible formatting and terrible grammar. Worse is when a user just goes "Is anyone willing to help me?" without giving any hint of their problem. To avoid that, we should hold homework and intro-level physics questions to the same standard as on the main site, in chat i.e. you should

  1. show us your effort and research --- have you done basic Googling at least?

  2. use proper formatting (format mathematical expressions with ChatJax).

  3. use correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar to the best of your ability.

  4. not ask about asking; just ask.

  5. not simply post a screenshot of your question.

  6. not ping random users when asking for help.

To be honest, the last issue (regarding the asker's displayed effort) is what bothers me the most. Such chat messages which ask into-level physics homework questions or JEE-type questions, and don't follow the above 6 rules, should be shifted (immediately, on-sight) to the Problem Solving Strategies room, which was specifically created for discussing beginner-level questions (mostly high school physics) and is less harsh about such rules. I had once mentioned:

Imagine a professional physicist landing up on the main page of the site and noticing such JEE type problems all around. They're sure to go - 'tis not the place for serious physics, and leave the site for good (I half-believe that's already happening :/). Add to that the terrible question formattings.

Recently, I've started to feel the same way about chat. Nevertheless, I would like to hear this community's opinions on this topic and suggestions about how we can bring more experts and enthusiastic physics students to our chat room who'd be more interested in discussing dinosaurs rather than alphabets!

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Note: @Chair has given an excellent idea below, that is, we should write up a set of room rules and link it in the room description. That's great and I'm considering starting a new meta thread about that (listing out the "room-rules") once this is settled. But what I'm particularly interested in is: your opinions about what we should do if a new user does not follow the "room rules" (like posting a screenshot of a homework question, pinging random users, posting homework with questions having terrible formattings, etc.). Should we

1. immediately (on-sight) shift their messages to the problem-solving room after giving them a warning.

2. immediately (on-sight) delete their messages after giving them a warning.

3. just give them a warning and do nothing else?

Or something else?

In my opinion, we should go with option 1. However, in case of repeated offenses, we should hand out 30-minute timeouts and perhaps suspensions in the more extreme cases.

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@Chair: That's among the main reasons why I was hesitant to write a set of rules as a rough draft. I'm not sure what most people want. It doesn't matter much that I like segregating rooms by topic (i.e. I think homework goes to JEE or problem-solving and meta matters go to physics-meta): if other people don't mind homework, then they stay in the hbar.

I do agree with him that segregating rooms by topics would be a good idea. Post homework and beginner level physics questions in the problem-solving room. Post meta-related issues in the meta room^*. Leave the main chat (The h Bar) for discussing dinosaurs (real physics and other interesting stuff)!

Expressing your opinion, at this juncture, is very important --- otherwise, we won't know what you (as a community) want and this issue will remain forever suspended. This discussions needs to take place now so that we can understand the majority opinion and act accordingly.

^{*I'm aware that the Physics Meta room isn't too active these days. But I'm sure that if you really want to discuss any meta related issue you can simply mention the topic you want to discuss, in The h Bar; the regulars and mods will follow up the discussion in the Physics Meta room.}

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^{Related: Have we lost the necessary critical mass of professional physicists?}

Answer 1

I am absolutely in favour of reviving the chat sessions if anyone has good ideas. Likewise, I think an ad could indeed increase at least the awareness that chat exists.

However, I think we need to be careful with the formalization of chat due to its inherently informal nature. Room rules themselves - "no no-effort homework, don't flood the chat, don't ask to ask" - are probably a useful idea so that newcomers don't have to learn the culture by pure osmosis.

But I think declaring in advance what we should do with those that violate them seems both premature and overly specific. The room owners should do whatever seems right in the moment. I can certainly imagine all sort of examples where each of "doing nothing/moving the messages/deleting the messages/suspending the user" would be appropriate. Additionally, it is not guaranteed that the room is 24/7 overseen by a moderator or room owner (although our coverage is pretty good in my impression), so promising a specific consequence would justify disgruntled users pointing to an instance where e.g. the messages were not immediately deleted and asking why it didn't happen there if the rules say this always happens. Only promise a specific consequence if you can afford to actually ensure it.

Lastly, beware a culture where, instead of explaining the rules to newcomers, we just point at the rules and scold the users for not having read them. (No one pays attention to the MathJax link in the room description, so don't expect anyone to pay more attention to any room rules linked there.)

Answer 2

Here's a pretty obvious solution which prevents people from being driven away by help-vampires: we simply formalize all those quick fixes, and give them more specific recognition than 'unspoken canon', which somewhat resembles the present status. Right now, the only written one is 'don't ask about asking', and that's written casually enough for one to easily avoid taking it too seriously.

Instead of having to bring them up each time, we can have a concrete set of guidelines explicitly linked in the room description. I've looked in at the Stack Overflow Python room a few times (link to the room), and they have a distinct set of rules prominently positioned. That should help the well-intentioned askers from accidentally making mistakes, and it will provide strong grounds for formally informing homework dump-like questions that they aren't OK. But with what we have together right now, there's nothing to tell me that posting a picture of my homework there is out of line, as long as I don't start thinking about why I was given that assignment in the first place.

An important consideration is that we should write fun rules which reflect the aspects of the room culture (most notably JR's pictures of food :P), and shows that while there are canons to be conformed to, it's also a place for fun. The Python room does it well: they don't sound like killjoys, and we should make sure we don't either.

Additionally, we will need to stop advertising chat as a possible homework dump. I've seen a lot of comments under homework questions recommending chat in a rather questionable way. Many comments get this right, by mentioning that askers should format their work appropriately and show some effort, but a lot of them don't. The meta question regarding places to ask homework questions has two answers which mention chat: this and this, the second of which provides less than satisfactory warnings (fortunately it's heavily downvoted, though those seem to be for other reasons). Our advertisements of chat should be carefully worded.

This leaves the issue of attracting experts to the chats without a resolution. I think one way to add some interesting content there would be to redirect some of the questions which are closed as opinion-based, engineering, and non-mainstream on the main site to chat. Again, we must be careful about which ones we redirect. The non-mainstream policy is designed to keep out random speculation, which would be just as annoying in a chat. But there are some more subtle questions which would probably be OK, though I haven't seen examples. Engineering questions have a similar case: I'm sure a few of the borderline ones (particularly those not resembling 'build this device for me') would be of some interest to chat users, though they're technically off-topic on the main site. I have certainly seen a few well-thought out but unfortunately opinion-based questions closed (though I don't have any links at my disposal), and those would be great chat topics. The standard format of these salvageable opinion-based questions is 'what do you think of so-and-so paper?' (Note: an attempt to create this kind of conversation in chat was very well-received but apparently unsuccessful. The meta post regarding the same is here)

_{I lurk in chat without saying much, so I think that a set of guidelines written by a more regular participant would be a better reflection of what exactly people would want to talk about. I just thought I'd chime in since the Python room's guide looked like something worth mentioning and it answers the question to some extent.}

Answer 3

Make it visible on the internet.

The chat links looks like an ad banner and my banner blindness automatically filter them out. I have never noticed it's there and I have never used the chat and I have never, ever arrived on any Stack Exchange chat page from Google or from any search engine. Either they are actively excluded from indexing, or have terrible SEO.

I guess others ignored it too for the same reasons so far. If we can fix this, then people will come.

Answer 4

To be ruthless about it, in order to keep and gain more professionals, completely, totally ban the homework related questions. Currently, people that ignore the homework warnings are still treated nicely, but I think this is one area where the "be nice" policy is actively working to reduce the quality of the site.

I've been on and off this site for five years, and in that time Google has really picked up on indexing homework questions. This has driven away all but the most dedicated professionals and I'm doubtful that this decline can be reversed.

Self-interest disclaimer: The site is an invaluable resource for self study types like myself, but imo the homework questions are slowly killing it.