That beginning sounded worse that I meant it. I meant that since you were not a regular in the room before the system went into place you cannot understand the frustration levels of the owners / regulars and therefore the message might seem trivial to you and others in your position.

@MadScientist well, as you clearly cannot understand our frustration leading into the system that greets users it will be hard for you to understand why it is actually a good thing in certain rooms. In the JavaScript room this message is getting a clear message a crossed that for some reason the pinned stars in all caps and bolded as well as the room description was not. Which is: "do not ask to ask, just ask your question.". Honestly, it may sound silly but after being asked a couple hundred times "can I ask a q?" you just get annoyed and never help those users. so I guess it helps both sides

@MadScientist you voluntarily accepted chat interaction by joining the chat. sorry. As for the questionable command that can be and will be removed. like I mentioned these are all plugins and each bot running said command took it willingly (or just didn't look). So it will have to be removed from each fork of the bot if we want it gone for good.

@FlorianMargaine I appreciate the suggestion, however I do think that if this is going to be open for discussion that more than one party from either end should be involved. To keep focused on constructive conversation said parties should probably be chosen carefully.

Unfortunately the chat has no private messaging options. Otherwise this may have been considered.

To add to my last comment: We have tried to just pin said message, and include it in the description. However we found it was much more effective (and actually being read) when the user got a ping specifically to them containing the information. This is why it is useful to us, and this is why the JavaScript room would like it to stay.

@KevinPanko I can understand that point. But please also consider what the bot is telling you and how to a regular user that information being told to all participating in the chat at least once might be useful. In the Javascript room I know the message is more along the lines of "Welcome to the chat, Here are the unofficial rules. Please don't ask to ask, just ask and if we are around we'll answer it" - this has saved us from the dreaded "Hey guys! Is it ok to ask a question in here?" which was happening quite frequently in our little slice of SO.

@allquixotic or just log out and do the same :P but this is the 'in place' solution as I see it. However incognito window is a good suggestion as well. Cheers!

@KevinPanko the flip side of that is: The bot has no special powers that a regular user doesn't have. I often will ping new users and comment about their name, gravatar, location, etc. I also often creep profiles. If you have made this information public by being on SO, or joining the room then that is perfectly acceptable. Would you detest me greeting you in lieu of a bot? I must re-enforce, the bot is in no way special or above and beyond the system. It adheres to the exact same rules users do in the chat systems. as a side note: view the transcript if you don't want to be on the room list.

) I whole-heartedly agree here. (and I like closing braces). The discussion in the JS chat room was a little hard to follow with all of the flying inputs. However we are very interested in being part of this discussion as most of the room owners in Javascript use the chat frequently ( I will point to my own usage logs for this ).

The objectionable command: ok well I can see how some people wouldn't want this. However the fact that it exists in other rooms is because said rooms chose to include the plugin (most commands are available as plugins when you build the bot), but if the profanity is an issue then ok (however I argue that profanity exists all over the site). As far as the greeting message goes, I still don't understand why this would be a system wide rule and not just imposed on the rooms bots that don't want it.