Should the "new questions" feed be made into a drop-down feed instead of one-boxing feed?

Question

To quote @Vogel612 in chat today, with regards to CaptainObvious, the new questions feed in the main chat:

so many bot posts... at this point I think we should consider turning CaptainObvious into a drop-down feed instead of a one-boxing screen-eating monster

So here it is for everyone to discuss and vote on. I wrote up a breakdown of the pros/cons, for those who don't frequent The 2nd Monitor very often.

Would it be best to leave the CaptainObvious feed as it is, or to change it to a "New feed items" drop-down?

Answer 1

Keep the one-boxing user-like feed

This is how it works at the time of this writing. The RSS feed receives new questions every few minutes (usually around 10-15 minutes it seems), and posts each individual question link as if the feed were a regular chat user:

Pros:

• Easy to get a bird's eye summary of the question which allows for easier handling for moderation

• The ability to "reply" to a specific post (as seen by @Vogel612 in screenshot) with commentary

• Shows clickable tags as part of the message

• Causes the chat room to feel active during non-active periods

• More easily sparks discussion regarding questions (and perhaps the feed itself) from users

• Feed information persists for all users in the room currently, and new users joining the room

Cons:

• Takes up a lot of vertical room (roughly 5-6 normal chat post lines) for each message

• Can be distracting when users are trying to have a conversation

• During certain times, e.g. when the feed might be lagging, it's not uncommon for 4-5+ questions to get posted at the same time, effectively scrolling down a whole screen

• Can confuse new users; "Who's @CaptainObvious?" is a frequent phrase

Answer 2

Okay just to illustrate what I'm talking about. The following two images are the twelve hours between 23:50 and 12:50 MEST:

I have marked the "real users" that were active during that time in the chatroom with red dots ...

This is a very discouraging image for me, because it gives the impression that the room is essentially deserted.

Zak and I noticed that the room is significantly less active as of recent and it's something that we as RoomOwners want to find reasons to so that we can eliminate them ... I think the high volume of Bot posts is one reason for lack of conversation especially in European activity times :/

Answer 3

Change it to a dropdown "New feed items"

This is used for feeds in other rooms. For instance, here is a screenshot of it (upper-left) from the Rubberduck VBA room:

Pros:

• It only takes up vertical space at the top of the screen and does not affect messages at all, rather than pushing messages up into the main chat feed

• It can be dismissed or ignored easily

• Will likely eliminate questions from new users about the feed user (since there won't be one); no more "Who's @CaptainObvious?"

Cons:

• It provides very little information about the posts (i.e. only the titles) so each link must be clicked to get any more information

• It makes it less convenient to address a post, i.e.: you have to copy the link from the RSS feed and post it back in chat

• Some would argue the large orange RSS logo in the background is a bit of an eye sore

• Will cause the chat room to feel even less active during non-active hours

• Will likely lose visibility/discussion on the issue

• Once the feed is dismissed, getting the list of questions back is moderately difficult

• The feed does not contain questions posted before you joined chat