I created one of the so called “poverty chats”, originally when Trump sent his chat to sub-only permanently.
After the first two weeks or so, the chat gradually turned into a more general Hearthstone/Gaming chat. At that point I mostly stopped inviting people and now (a few months later) we are still going. We are a small group of people and have become a pretty tightly knit community.
I created a custom chat bot for the group chat (as nightbot/moobot didn’t support group chats out of the box), out of pure neccessity at the start, when we had 100-200 people chatting (and sometimes spamming) simultaneously.
Over this time, the main gripes I had were the following:
- lack of proper documentation for the group chat API
- features that are available via the API, but not in the web UI and are not explained in detail. Like renaming a chat, setting it to public/private invites, the fact that all mods could invite people in chats with private invites, but that’s not available in the UI
- Mods do not show up as such in group chat (this is because the API call for the chatter list isn’t fully functional in group chats)
- the /ban command simply doesn’t work (we need to /timeout 9999999). It used to at some point, but hasn’t been for a while now. @Fire mentioned this problem. When /ban used to work it would actually remove the chat from the user’s chat list.
- there is no way to remove people from chat. currently, it’s not unusual for our group chat to have more than 1000 people online and 10-20 people actually talking
The thing I appreciate most about group chat is to be able to take a cool group of people on to your favorite stream and just chat with them instead of putting up with the Spamfest of popular channels. The /host feature partially supports this, but a lot of the time not everybody is watching the same stream, which can’t be catered to with hosting.
If group chat was removed entirely, our group would move to the channel page of our chatbot and I’d host streams there. Maybe make a vote feature for the bot so people can decide on what to watch.
Yes, I would be sad but we’d probably find a way.
I do prefer the current way though, where everybody just opens up their favorite stream and pops up group chat directly on that page. But please make it into a full feature that actually works properly and is thought out if you keep group chat.
This has been a bit rambly, but I hope you can get some insight out of it 