Although it may seem daunting to start talking in an unfamiliar room or site, The 2nd Monitor is a great room, and the friendly regulars will help you to feel right at home.
Some questions you may have:
How do I ask questions or get help with a post on the site using chat? What topics are appropriate for chat?
In The 2nd Monitor, site business always comes first, and if you have a question or need help with a post, that's site business. You can ask in chat, just make sure to be nice and polite. Other topics are not inappropriate for chat, but, site business always comes first. Make sure to keep that in mind when asking a question. Additional details.
Who moderates the chat room?
Chat is Moderated by our site moderators. Their usernames are shown in blue.
All moderators in the Stack Exchange Network are automatically chat moderators. This means you may see other users with blue names. While they have the power to moderate chat, they seldom do in the 2nd monitor.
Aside from the moderators, there are also room owners. Room owners' names are shown in italics. The current room owners can be seen on the info page under "Owners of this room".
In chat you can ping users by using the @ symbol before their name. Usually there's a moderator or room owner available and responds when you ping them.
What if I seek further code advice or clarification related to an existing post?
Commenting on the post is a good way to seek clarification on a code issue, however, for older posts, this may not work. Otherwise, you can post the question in chat and one of our friendly regulars can help you with anything you need clarified. If you seek further code advice, posting your updated code as a new question is a great way to ask for it. Along with that, you can include some information in your post describing a potential issue or concern you had with some of your existing code.
What if I have some time to spare and would just like to rub elbows with fellow coding enthusiasts? Is some idle/fun chat allowed?
Idle/fun chat is not necessarily off-topic, but, you need to remember the golden rule: Site business always comes first. The 2nd Monitor regulars often rub elbows with idle chat, but site business should always be respected. More details.
How can The 2nd Monitor help me be a better Stack Exchange contributor, and how can it help keep me posted on what's happening on CodeReview.SE?
The 2nd Monitor is a nice-people-room and the regulars there can help you out with mostly any Stack Exchange questions you might have, and help you to write better posts. The room has incoming feeds from CodeReview.se and Stack Overflow, which keeps everyone posted on all the new questions. As your site reputation increases, you will gradually gain access to moderation tools of your own as well.
Who or what else is in the 2nd monitor?
The second monitor has 2 categories of non-human participants. The categories are:
- Feeds
- Bots
Feeds are simple RSS/atom readers that post messages to the room. Currently there's a significant number of feeds, that are posted to the 2nd monitor. The following list is an overview of the most important ones:
- "Recent Questions on Code Review" by Captain Obvious
- "Recent Questions on Code Review Meta" by Stack Exchange
- "Newest codereview-se Questions on Stack Overflow Meta" by Grima Wormtounge
- "Newest codereview-se Questions on Stack Exchange Meta" by Stack Exchange
- ...
A full list is available on the feeds page
Additionally there's currently one bot that posts to the Room.
@Duga (source code) is a bot designed by @SimonForsberg, who watches for comments on StackOverflow and Programmers.SE which contain the mentions or links to CodeReview.SE. Duga also keeps track of some GitHub repositories and she also posts daily stats on unanswered questions.
How or where can I learn about the memes/inside jokes of The 2nd Monitor and Code Review?
@Mat'sMug put together a compilation thread of the site's memes, their usage, cultural height, etc. You can read about them here!
