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What happened to the chatroom?

by MarcDiaz, September 11, 2016

Messages: 5

Language: English

MarcDiaz (User's profile) September 11, 2016, 1:41:44 PM

I know that in the previous version of this website lernu.net there used to be a chatroom. I found it to be a nice feature and quite useful. You could communicate with other Esperanto learners in real time and, in this way, practise the language whenever you wanted, as long as there were other members online, which was usually the case.

However, this chatroom no longer exists. Why did the people who run this webite decide to get rid of it?

plutrea (User's profile) September 12, 2016, 12:09:22 PM

indeed, where is it? you can't even send private messages anymore.

erinja (User's profile) September 12, 2016, 3:46:23 PM

The chat room was removed because of a persistent problem with trolls and spammers. A new chat room will need to be programmed for our site, which has been relaunched in the meantime, and the lernu! team is deciding how best to include a chat room without the old problems.

MarcDiaz (User's profile) September 12, 2016, 4:10:43 PM

The only solution I can find so far to this problem is blocking the accounts of those people who exhibit such a behaviour on the chat room.

Have you come up with other solutions?

Is this option of blocking certain accounts something which could not be done in the old version?

I see, however, that the same problem exists on the forum. I have seen trolls and spam. Yet, you did not decide to remove this function from your site. Why do you treat the chat room and the forum with different criteria?

erinja (User's profile) September 13, 2016, 9:29:00 PM

It's easier to moderate the forums because everything is recorded. People can send a link to the inappropriate content and we can evaluate it for ourselves before deciding whether to remove it or delete the user's account. The chat rooms are much more real-time and unless a user complaining about another user thought to copy and paste the other user's words to show us, we were left with not much in the way of proof of an offending user's words, unless we personally witnessed it (unlikely since no admins have time to hang around in a chat room). It was therefore impossible to tell whether the person reporting misinterpreted something or overreacted, or whether the user in question had actually broken the site's terms of service.

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