I worry MAU metrics will be impacted as account banning and re-ups should drop drastically.
2 Likes
I just found this site a couple of days ago. The chat is a major reason I have been on here every day since. If it goes, I may go as well.
11 Likes
I really hope this feature comes back in one way or another, in hopefully a more maintainable state. The coding challenges are what brought me to this site, and kept me busy the first few days, but the chat is what made me stay. I’ve had discussions about CoC games, chatted with the regulars in world chat, I’ve been responsible for some nice eureka-moments when I explained something about a puzzle or coding concept, and it’s in that same chat I read that it would be removed.
Discord sounds like a good alternative, but I don’t believe it can serve the same purpose of being a very accessible place to interact with the community. On top of that, many users are outright refusing to switch to discord.
I think CG is very dependent on its community. For me, a big part of the community is the chat. If you remove the chat, the community dies a bit, and CG suffers in return.
8 Likes
I understand that the chat experience was bad for a few weeks, even I got a bit tired of it sometimes, but I still feel like this is the wrong approach for the chat problem.
Last month(June) I practically didn’t have to ban anyone, I don’t know if anything changed on chat restrictions or not.
I think before removing the chat a few things could be tested (I’m not sure if this was done before or not), for example: higher level requirement, email verification, require the account to be N days old.
Maybe some more things could be done but these are the ones that come to the top of my head.
At the end it just seems that CG is removing the chat over a few bad apples ,and who is going to end up losing are the members that had nothing to do with it.
24 Likes
This is really sad, it feels like the whole epoch going in the sunset. I consider myself chat-taught rather than self-taught. A lot of my knowledge started to evolve from hearing an unknown word in chat and elaborating on that. I know that the community will still be there for me, but it just wont feel the same. I was always keeping the CG page open just in case some interesting discussion will pop up, I wont have a reason for this anymore. I don’t want to be dramatic, but i really think this will hurt community in a major way.
21 Likes
I agree 100% with this. That was my experience also.
9 Likes
Having a chat function on the site is always going to be more impactful than off-site chat via discord. Just introducing the friction of having to sign up or log in to discord will cause drop-off in adoption. The most active community members will go there but most others won’t. Chat on the site immediately lets newcomers know there is a community here that is active, and probably contributes fairly significantly to retention.
I’m sure you’ve got good reasons for wanting to do this, and you’ve already probably considered possible options. I understand you don’t want to maintain it. But, is there any way you could open source the chat functionality and have the community contribute to it with CG oversight? Could be win-win.
12 Likes
will CG survive?
10 Likes
I’ll just repeat after others it will be bad/sad if the chat is gone. Discord or any other separate entity is just not the same.
12 Likes
Add my name to the list of those believe that removing the chat would be a huge detriment to the site. I’ve seen several coding platforms go down the road of being less community-focused is one way or another, and as a result, I and many others essentially lost all interest in continuing to use them (CodeFights – er, sorry, “CodeSignal” 
– being a prime example). Like others stated, the chat is what makes CG feel “alive”, and it is also a tremendous educational resource for many.
The idea of restricting the use of the chat based on a user’s level would seem to be a fairly simple solution to the moderation issues. I really hope that the CG team will take this and other suggestions into consideration.
23 Likes
I’m new here but it was nice interacting with other players on clash chat rooms, and for sure on discord it will not be the same.
9 Likes
Hello,
Even if it seems like a lost cause :
I’m not active on the chat. But it’s always opened when i’m on Codingame. I read it regularly. Amongst other things : that’s mainly how i’m informed of what’s happening on CG.
For sure, it will seem a bit dead without it.
13 Likes
May I also add, until the spam problem on the discord server is resolved or dealt with somehow, it will put many people off. I have had all but announcements and the occasional other channel (eg contest-specific) on mute for what feels like forever.
You have a long way to go if you want the discord to work.
1 Like
RIP chat.
Respect to that intern, chat was a really nice addon on CG.
18 Likes
There is no thing as “Restrict the chat to a minimum level is really a simple solution”.
You can reach lvl 20+ by copy/pasting some hard puzzles solutions from the web. You can copy/paste your own solutions from your other accounts. And I don’t really see what would be the use of the community chat if this “community” must resolve many hard puzzles to join in.
As a moderator, the webchat is too difficult to keep safe. You can just kick or ban a user, but the messages are still there. The user then comes in your private message because they wants to know where your mother lives to very closely get in touch with her. 1 minute after, the user has a new account and can spam again.
On Discord, I can just ban the user and delete all of the messages in two clicks. And the user can’t contact me in private.
3 Likes
Many companies and countries (China) block discord, it will be difficult to tell who is who since the CG/Discord user names will usually be different, chat during clashes will be unfeasible, and in general you lose the real-time chat ability when it is off in another window.
If anything truly awful pops up, people just scroll if off with calls to the chat bot.
Adding a day or two waiting period before accessing the chat (or adding it far down on the quest map), and maybe email verification, solves most issues.
7 Likes
China isn’t a good example. They block everything they don’t control. To bypass this everyone in China, including their pet dog, use VPN. Chinese government officials use twitter despite the block.
Codingame isn’t big or popular enough for China to ban it.
In many respects, Discord is a far better solution than CG chat except that it is not integrated into CG ecosystem. That probably explains why, in nearly four years, on Discord, I have never had any discussion that reached the same level that is routinely achieved on CG chat. I would not lose that.
15 Likes
I totally get the need to fix the issues in chat. I’ve spent some memorable evenings repeatedly banning the same guy only for him to reappear and keep on being a ****. I also know how hard it often is to pick up legacy code written by someone who isn’t there anymore and who might not have known what he was doing when he wrote it. Discord is definitely a superior platform for that.
I do hope you will reconsider the decision not to embed it in some way, though. Echoing what others have said, the chat makes coding here a lot more fun, more like hanging out with friends than doing your homework after school.
5 Likes