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According to this answer to Exclude the main chat room from automatic freezing/deletion

This is now implemented. Main chat rooms do not freeze automatically due to inactivity.

It looks that the above is wrong (see the first answer to this Q and newest comments to the above referred answer).

Another finding from Meta SE, Main chatroom for a SE site and chatroom pruning,

The SE software keeps always one room for each SE site alive. But no particular room is chosen as the "main" room for a site.

By the other hand, what is the point to have a chat room that is use very rarely and the most common topic over the last months is

Posting a dummy post to keep the room from getting frozen.

Searching for dummy post returns 22 posts.

When someone post a comment, a widget is shown on Meta right panel

It's a bit annoying to find that the newest message in the last 2 weeks is a dummy/spammy post. Considering that to create a new chat room is required a rep 100, and that to participate on Meta it's just a rep 5 and usually people that require a someone to talk gets and answer faster on Meta than on chat...

Please, stop posting dummy/spammy comments.

2 Answers 2

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The answer you are referring to is wrong. "Main" chatrooms freeze just like any other (they have no special status at all). The only exception is that the last non-frozen room is prevented from freezing. For an illustration, I dropped by Open Data site and created a room: soon thereafter, their main room was frozen for inactivity because it lost its status of being the only non-frozen room. (Sorry, Open Data users.)

That said, it's true that Google-Fu will not freeze as long as it's the only non-frozen room, and therefore dummy messages are not needed for the time being. In other words Alex's dummy message is correct in observing it is not needed.

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  • Thanks. What do you think about posting dummy comments every two weeks by several months just to keep a chat room unfrozen?
    – Rubén Mod
    Feb 10, 2019 at 2:09
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    I don't really care, but if they are going to post something, it makes more sense to post with some content. What's the weather like today, a book read recently, what I had for breakfast, ... - anything would be better than a copy-paste of a dummy message.
    – user209081
    Feb 10, 2019 at 22:57
  • @Rubén I will add that some sites use a bot precisely for this purpose - to prevent the chatroom from getting frozen in the case of longer inactivity. In any case, now that I have notice the thread here, I'll abstain from posting the dummy messages.
    – Martin
    Mar 14, 2019 at 15:45
  • @Martin Thanks. It is OK for me that one or two dummy posts were done once in while but not having several months were the only content on chat are dummy posts.
    – Rubén Mod
    Mar 16, 2019 at 16:31
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A possible alternative which would keep the room from freezing and also it would be clear which messages are "fake" - even without having to go and check the content of the message - could be using a bot for this purpose.

Generic bot would post a message after a few days of silence - this would prevent the room from freezing. The message would put the room in the sidebar at least occasionally - which might be a positive thing, so that the users who notice this are reminded that the room exists. But since the username says that it is a bot, this suggests that it was a message posted exactly for this purpose. (Which should, at least partially, solve the complaint that: "It's a bit annoying to find that the newest message in the last 2 weeks is a dummy post.")

Several rooms use Generic Bot exactly for this. If this seems as a good idea, to get this working you could ask Floern, the user who created this bot. Typically you can find them in SEbotics - which is a room related to various bots. (For example, at the moment this user is pingable in that room.)

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