Should we unfreeze Politics chat?

Question

The main Politics chat room, Agora, has been programmatically frozen for inactivity. Should it be unfrozen?

Answer 1

Just to clarify under which circumstances a room is frozen. A room is frozen after 14 days without any activity. (A room can be deleted already after 7 days if there is almost no activity in there, but this is not the case for the type of room you are asking about - basically the "main"¹ chatroom for the site.)

The system always keeps at least one room associated with the site alive - not counting the rooms which were creating by moving comments to chat.² Specifically, in the case of this site, at the moment there are two "standard" rooms with Politics as a parents site. One of them is Política Brasil which seems to be rather active. The room named Agora seems to be relatively silent. (So it is not that surprising that if has been frozen and unfrozen in the past.)

One solution to prevent the room from getting frozen would be to start using it a bit more - it's possible that eventually there will be a community of users who visit the room regularly and discuss various thing, related specifically to this site or to politics in general.

I am not sure to which extent a solution like this would be ideal, but I'll mention that some sites use a bot to prevent freezing of a specific room - this bot posts a message into the room after several days of silence.³

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¹Strictly speaking, there is not such a thing as "the main chatroom" in Stack Exchange terminology. But usually when a site is created, also a separate room is created together with some welcome message posted at the beginning. The term main chatroom often refers to the room like this. On some sites, the users actually started to use a different room from the room which was created in this way - the term main chatroom is sometimes used also in this sense, i.e., the room which is commonly used for general discussions related to the specific site.

²Details about this can be found in various posts on Meta Stack Exchange. But the information related to this seems to be scattered in several posts - at least I did not find a single post which gives a concise summary.

³Possibly there are also some other bots that can be used for this. The one I am aware of is Generic Bot. Creator of this room is the user Floern, you can find them quite often in the SOBotics room. So if this way of prevention freezing sounds like a good idea, you might try to contact them and ask them whether they could add also this room to the list.