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Stack Exchange sites can get closed if the become inactive.. The site contents are removed and are available only as data dumps.

However, chat rooms have a more liberal retention policy: they are kept permanently if they got at least 15 messages by 2 users.

So what happens to chat rooms associated with sites that get deleted? I think each chat room has to have a parent site, but these rooms' parent sites will cease to exist.

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Here's an example: the chat room for Astronomy.SE was deleted. –  Anna Lear Jan 16 '13 at 21:37
@AnnaLear: It only had 13 messages, though. –  Mechanical snail Jan 16 '13 at 21:55
The Firearms chat is still open. It isn't even frozen... I wonder if that's a bug. –  Jeremy Banks Jan 16 '13 at 21:59
Looking at the page HTML, it still considers that chat room to be associated with the now-dead domain: host: 'firearms.stackexchange.com' –  Jeremy Banks Jan 16 '13 at 22:08
@JeremyBanks: Also seen by clicking on the site rooms link. Add that as an answer. –  Mechanical snail Jan 16 '13 at 22:09

2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Let's looks at some of these chat rooms .




  • Astronomy - 6 messages (deleted by unknown cause)
  • Healthcare IT - 14 messages (deleted automatically)
  • Sexuality - 548 message (deleted manually)

Rooms seem to have been deleted according to the normal rules, but for some reason many have remained open instead of being frozen.

Apparently the rooms are still associated with the domains of the closed sites; each page's source includes information about the room in JSON like this:

     id: 1570,
     host: 'healthcareit.stackexchange.com',
     deleted: true,
     frozen: false
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Chat rooms are kept, as they are linked to the stack exchange chat, and not the general website. Great example being the firearms chat. This is still open, and it's parent site is listed as firearms.stackexchange.net. This however redirects to the dead Area51 Proposal.

They must still stay within the requirements listed in the original question to be kept however.

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