LessWrong Study Hall will be password-protected
The community of the LessWrong Study Hall decided to protect access to the chatroom with a password. The password is: “lw”.
Rationale: the LessWrong Study Hall started to have a serious trolling problem recently. As it grew in popularity it started to be automatically advertised on the tinychat.com main page, which attracts a demographics that has no idea about the goals of the Study Hall. We have no business dealing with those who seek online company to smoke weed and/or masturbate.
The password should be publicly available, and shown in plain text whenever the URL to the Study Hall is mentioned. The only users we want to exclude are the internet passers-by, who have literally no idea what that chatroom is about.
The password will be introduced in a day or two, after we inform all the regulars about the change.
Your link to the study hall is broken. The study hall can be found here.
Fixed.
What is the Less Wrong Study Hall?
In short, it is a place where LessWrongers do Pomodoros constantly on a fixed schedule. Some people also have their cameras on so it can fell more social (and thus make it more binding). You can find it here and this is the doc in the topic of the Hall with further information.
I predict an increase (non-trolling) participation in the chat room after this.
What do you mean by participation? How would you measure that?
Mean people-in-chat/hour.
Are there any records available from before this post was made (I’m not just being difficult, I’m trying to make [and later score] my own predictions)?
No, unfortunately not. I don’t know tinychat well, but I don’t think data on that is available anywhere, so the only way to estimate it would be to ask people. (I also keep a list of new additions in the order I met them, so I can roughly say if there have been more or less new people around lately, but this is not accurate/complete/what you asked for.)
There should be a wiki entry for this.
The password is in place now. If you know someone who does not frequent LW and might not have read this, please contact them.