> My thought on this is very close. As a rule, I do not like 20-person chats, and this would be the case even if I liked and enjoyed all 20 of them.
>
> This, however, is what private rooms were made for. I am baffled by why private rooms aren't used to solve this problem. Actually, of everyone, you are probably the best at trying, and sometimes it pays off. But I don't understand why it doesn't happen more. The fact is, almost everybody agrees that the community is too large for a single room, yet 90% of the time only one room is in use.

I agree.

But I have more to say. (So much for getting back to work. Good thing it's a quiet afternoon.) I had thought about addressing this in my other post, but I forgot.

I REALLY don't like private rooms in RinkChat. Why? Well, in many ways, they epitomize to me the worst aspects of the elitisism (is that a word?) that tends to be one of our common failings in this community.

You mentioned in your original post that one of the things you don't like about LiveJournal and AIM is how exclusionary they can be, and how much they can lead to people feeling left out. I see RinkChat's private rooms as a much worse culprit on the same problem, and the reasons for it being a problem are often accidental.

If somebody creates a private room in RinkChat because they want to talk to a few other SPECIFIC people, that's fine. Create the room, invite those people, everybody's happy. However, if somebody wants to create a private room to chat with a broader group of their friends, we get into a world of problems.

First of all, the person who creates the room has to remember to invite EVERYONE they might want to chat with. For me, that list would include at least twenty or thirty people, and probably a heck of a lot more than that. I'd be lucky if I could remember half of them. New RookChat features like being able to alias groups of names would certainly help, but what happens if I forget one person and I have a lively private room going and that one person logs in, sees nobody interesting logged in, and logs out again? I never get them on my list. They feel alienated. If they find out about my private room, they feel hurt. I know that for myself, I've been on the receiving end of that sort of thing once or twice, and I can't say that I much liked it. Maybe it was unintentional that I felt excluded on those occasions, but that doesn't change the result, or the fact that I had no power to do anything about it.

Then, of course, there's the problem of new blood in RinkChat. Every one of us was new here at one point or another. I still think of people like Sosiqui, wintermute, and teach as "new" sometimes because they started posting here after I did. Most people reading this probably have some idea of how absurd that idea is. My point is, these three, and dozens of other people, are all wonderful members of this community, and without a consistent strong public room presence, they never would have really been able to get involved here. I have a feeling that if the problems of inviting people to private rooms could be worked out, more and more of us would retreat there over time, and I think that many factors would lead to the community dying out as a result of it.

I'm not managing to convey all of my thoughts on this subject very well, because of a lack of time. Hopefully, you see my point. At the moment, I don't think greater use of private rooms is the answer, and frankly, I wouldn't be too unhappy to see them go. I've made good use of them recently for certain sticky matters, but that doesn't come up much, and private messages generally do the trick almost as well. I see the small benefits as being heavily outweighed by the problems.