This Julia Discourse appears to have a chat (Channels / general at the bottom of the side-bar). Sending messages to that chat seems to notify everyone, which is a bit intrusive.
I think we have plenty of Julia chat options with Slack and Zulip already. Would it be possible to disable the entire feature so that it does not get used inadvertently?
But it’s nice to have one communication place for everything…
I don’t know how the Discourse chat compare to the other options, but one alternative set up could be to disable the automatic opt-in notification in the general chat channel, even better if there could be an auto opt-in on message post, that expires after some times… so there is still a “general” chat thread but you receive notifications only if you recently posted on it (or if someone explicitly ping you)…
Tanks for that note. I personally deactivated it, because I am on Zulip and slack and that together with the forum here is enough granularity (short, vanishing stuff on slack, longer chats on Zulip, open discussions with longer arguments here) for me.
An alternative option is to leave the #general channel on chat (via the channel interface.)
Thanks!
It took me a minute to find the proper page. For other lost users: open https://discourse.julialang.org/chat/browse/open and click on the red button 
…disabling that does not seem to work so well though.
I still see the chat and notifications atop.
When I go to the preferences (where the chat is not checked) and click safe, the chat icon vanishes. but when I revisit the forum the chat is back. So this is also still a bit buggy.
For now I’ve closed the “general” channel — that’s the chat channel that automatically added all users. I have found chat DMs to be useful in the past.
If there’s a consensus to choose to start using chat I’ll be happy to re-enable the whole-board chat, but this was just a new feature of Discourse that was auto-enabled during some auto-upgrade a while back.
It’s also worth noting there’s a good deal of site-wide customizability that we can do here (but we haven’t intentionally done anything).
