Why can't I find the chat room that was created from a comment thread?

Question

Every now and then over-lengthy comment threads increasingly become off-topic to the post or do no longer add value for a specific question. Long comment threads will raise a moderator flag to make sure the clean-up of comments takes place. Moderators are expected to delete outdated comments.

In case some issues are of value still, the discussion becomes increasingly off topic to the question, or issues were not yet entirely resolved we have the option to rather than just delete move all comments to an own chat room created for this purpose only. If that happened we see an auto-comment like this one

This will be a link to the newly created chat room. If we come back to the question after a while it may happen however, that this link leads to Stack Exchange "page not found" page.

What can we do to avoid this?

Answer 1

What happens here has to do with how chat works and what rooms are stored, and what rooms are deleted.

Quoting from the Chat FAQ:

Will these rooms exist forever?

Rooms will exist indefinitely, so long as there is at least one person actively talking in the room. A room is considered worth retaining if it has more than 15 messages by at least 2 users.

Rooms not worth retaining which are inactive for 7 days will be deleted. Rooms worth retaining which are inactive for 14 days will be frozen. Frozen rooms do not allow any new messages to be sent, and are not shown in the default room list to prevent cluttering the rooms interface.

To be clear this means, that the moved comment discussion did not "bust" the limit required to make the room "worth retaining". Which means that the discussion was probably not really relevant in the first place.

Everything else is available in the transcript licensed under CC-BY-SA.

You can find rooms considered "worth retaining" in the overview of all chatrooms hosted at german.se

What can we do to avoid this?

Well use the feature. 15 messages is really not that much. In the "worst case" you can ask a mod (or roomowner) to move all the messages to a special chatroom for preserving such discussions.

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In this very specific case, the room in question had 14 messages prior to deletion. If you wish to preserve the chat. just write a message...

Answer 2

Comment clean-up is an important means to unclutter the site and to keep questions and answers short, to the point, and easily readable for future visitors.

• Therefore it is encouraged we clean up our own comments after an issue was resolved.

If that did not lead to a significant reduction of comments on a question or answer the system flag will help moderators to step in and clean up a comment thread that obviously was too long.

In case an issue was not resolved all participants of that comment thread are invited go to a chat room especially created for them to further discuss matters, or to save information they had posted to copy them into a question or an answer.

Only if the discussion does not continue in this chat room we assume that there are no further issues. Then the system will automatically delete that room to keep the number of chat rooms manageable.

• So, whenever an issue in a comment thread was not resolved we should indeed continue the discussion in chat to avoid the deletion of that chat room (also see this answer here).

Also see a recent Meta discussion on comment moderation: Change "comment" to "critique or request clarification"

• In exceptional cases when such a chat room was deleted too early we can ask any chat moderator to undelete it again. We can thencontinue the discussion there. To do so just flag the comment with the link to that room for moderator attention.

Answer 3

Just a suggestion:

Instead of creating a chat that vanishes a few hours or days later, so that nobody can see it anymore (which in fact means deleting the comments), we should create a new thread in a board that will not be deleted, so that you later (even 5 years later) can find the discussion and read it again, and - if something new has to be added, you can prolong this discussion.