Should something be done about frozen main chat room?

Question

The chat room for health.SE called Waiting Room has been frozen recently. As far as I know, the SE software keeps always at least one room, even if it is inactive for longer than 14 days. However, since another chatroom was created and the "main" chatroom was inactive for long time, it was frozen. (For some details on chatroom pruning see here.)

As a result, the only room currently associated with health.SE is a room devoted to a specific topic. (If you click in that list on show frozen/deleted rooms, you can see the inactive rooms, too. The info for Waiting Room says that the last message was posted 71 days ago by CreationEdge.)

Should something be done about this? Should the room be unfrozen? Should we try to prevent freezing of the room in the future? What action should be taken if the room freezes again?

On one hand, if somebody comes here and wants to use chat to ask about something related to the site, they will not be able to use the chatroom. (Well maybe if the user is experienced enough, they will know that they can ask a moderator to unfreeze a chatroom.)

On the other hand, no messages for the period longer than two months shows that the room was not actually used that much lately and perhaps that can be and indicator that the room is not really needed?

Answer 1

Thank you for pointing this out. I think it makes sense to keep the room open so that people can discuss things that come up. Chat rooms go through warm and cold phases, and ours has been on the chillier side recently, but that doesn't mean it always will be. I think it's especially nice to have a chat room available to redirect comment threads that are inappropriate for comments. For that purpose I find the general site room a better outlet than the "personalized" chat rooms because others are more likely to chime in and, well, chat.

I have unfrozen the room. If anyone has any objection..... well, wait a few months and see what happens. On the other hand, if you agree with keeping it open and notice that it has frozen over again in the future, feel free to flag/ping a mod any which way (e.g. a flag on this Q&A), and it's easy to re-warm.