Should the Off the Leash chat be abandoned?

Question

Currently there are two official chat rooms for Pets SE:

• The Litter Box
  for all pets-related content;
• Pets Chat - Off the Leash
  for everything else.

In theory, off-topic messages can be migrated from the Litter Box to Off the Leash.

Looking at the latest history, the latter seems mostly unused. The last user post was almost six months ago and the user was gently redirected to the Litter Box. It regularly auto-froze for inactivity and stayed frozen for circa five months twice since January 2020. Random mods will unfreeze it now and then, but that is about all that happens.

So questions to the community:

• Do we keep both rooms or just one?
• And in the second case, do we keep the restrictions to “pets only” or broaden the scope of the Litter Box?

Answer 1

Seeing these long periods of inactivity, I think it's self evident that we no longer need to keep Pets Chat - Off The Leash active. The only way it would still be needed is if Pets was a much larger and more active site, with chatrooms constantly bustling with activity. I propose that it just be left frozen. There's no need to delete it, and who knows, maybe someday Pets will need it again.

As for the scope of The Litter Box, I think the scope should be broadened a little. Realistically, the chats going on in the Litter Box haven't strictly been about pets anyways. It's not uncommon for people to say hi or talk about how their day's been, and this seems to be the norm for a lot of sites' chatrooms.

Answer 2

Off the Leash chat room has been officially and explicitly declared as obsolete for now. I have done this to match the needs of our community that were expressed in this Q&A; however, none of the modifications are set in stone and they could be reverted anytime in the future if the community decides that it should be done.

List of my modifications:

• adding [obsolete] to the chat room's name;
• removing reference to Off the Leash from Litter Box's description that was guiding users to join Off the Leash for off-topic discussions;
• modifying usage guidance in Off the Leash's description to past tense to further indicate its obsolescence.

What is more, since none of Litter Box's established owners have interacted with our chat room within the last half a year, and this fact manifested itself a few days ago as a problem in the context of automatic process responsible for appointments of room owners in such circumstances, I added these trusted members of Pets SE as new room owners: AllisonC, C.Koca, Elmy, HarryV, Journeyman Geek, SerenaT, and trond hansen.