March removal of chat
The frontpage chat has taken a one week vacation, starting on March 10, 2024 11 PM EDT and ending on March 17, 2024 11 PM EDT.
Pending changes
The front page chat will be disabled for 7 days, starting on March 10 at 11 PM Eastern Time, and ending on March 17.
Security measures for the canvas will be bolstered to make it easier to hold conversations on the canvas with as minimal scripting disruptions as possible.
Justification
This decision followed years of problems that have piled on top of each other.
It's acknowledged that the front page chat is regularly used by a group of people. However this has always been the case even dating back to March 2018 when the chat first came into fruition.
The problem with the chat is that it's mostly unmoderated, which can lead to liability issues whenever illegal things are said which includes threats and grooming.
One of the main concerns with the chat is that the entire community gets concentrated into one single chat box, which makes it easier for trolls to efficiently troll the entire community and break it apart.
While there's no guarantee the removal of the chat will lead people to use the canvas more or group up into their own sub-worlds, the expected outcome is that the chat no longer inhibits OWOT's social functioning.
It's been known that the state of the chat will not improve with the way it's currently managed and will lead to worse problems if kept enabled for longer.
Future plans
It's clear that people seek a real community hub on OWOT. Such a hub may require an immense amount of effort. There are no concrete plans to make one, but it's a possibility in the future.
Should a good community hub exist, it will be permanently linked on the center console on the front page.
Analysis and Conclusion
Prelude
The frontpage chat has been disabled on March 10, 2024 @ 11 PM EDT until March 17 @ 11 PM EDT. This was done to analyze the effects of having no frontpage chat, even if the experiment wasn't ideally set up from the get-go. Originally the duration was set to go for 31 days, but security issues prevented that from happening and thus was brought down to one week.
Pre-removal
During the days leading up to the removal of the chat, the community appeared to look eager to see it removed. In the minutes leading up to its removal, the frontpage chat has seen the most activity in its nearly six years of existence.
Post-removal
Immediately after the chat got removed, the server experienced several attacks by an individual which included DoS attacks. Activity also dropped immediately, but it's hard to judge whether it was caused by the server going down for several minutes due to the DoS attack.
Since it was announced that the chat's removal had a definitive end date, it had an impact on the outcome of the chat's removal.
For such a small community and such short a time, there was no surefire way to conclusively determine whether the removal of the chat is a good thing for the future of OWOT.
The best way to measure such data was to pay attention to the activity of the canvas. Over the span of seven days, activity levels on the spawn did not increase to expected levels. Overall, nothing extraordinary happened and manual (non-script) spam made it difficult to hold proper conversations.
Most users have used the Global channel during this period, making it harder to analyze the true impact. However, it can be deduced that without Global as well, it would not have increased site-wide activity by a large amount.
Most users supported its removal, while a tiny minority protested against its removal by either spamming or expressing discontent. This didn't have any further influence on our end date for the chat's removal.
After restoration
As soon as the frontpage chat came back, people immediately started chatting on the frontpage chat. A select few expressed discontent for its return. The status quo returned to pre-March 10 levels, which was to be expected. The website is not completely ready for a removal of the frontpage chat and/or Global channel any time soon.