I'm the dude from the referenced link, so I guess I should weigh in, huh? Apologies in advance as this is gonna be long. I'm definitely another profanity offender ([NSFW aggregation of F-Bombs in The Comms Room][1]), and I ***do*** work in an office where NSFW rules apply - The caveat being that the tech team here is known for locking ourselves in an office and cursing the ever-loving Cthulhu out of our users, business partners, vendors, etc. To me that's very much what SF Chat has become - An "office" of sorts where the regulars lock themselves in and blow off steam. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's a thing. My experience is that when you get a bunch of sysadmins together and we're going to kibitz and kvetch and probably cuss, probably because it's *not* something that our normal work allows. When you've got Cisco TAC keeping you in a never-ending-hellish-hold-world-of-holding, or IBM refusing to send you a field engineer even though your AS/400 won't IPL because its RAID battery is dead, or your crazy business partners screaming "Just put untested software into production! We want it NAO!" there's certainly plenty of steam to blow off. <br /> <br /> Similarly when we see *truly awful* questions come to the site we post them in the comms room and they attract a healthy share of ridicule -- I call these the `PLEEZ HALP!` type questions - and I take full blame for introducing the regulars to the word [`HALP!` (probably SFW search for HALP)][2]. * Some of these questions get blasted out of existence with close votes. * Some of them get comments asking for clarification (or explaining why we need more info). * Some of them actually get answers (Just because it made no sense to me doesn't mean someone else doesn't get it). A lot of that probably comes from the fact that those of us in The Comms Room have the time throughout the day to look at the site, and we see a lot of bad questions. It's the inevitable result of the site getting more popular, and I'm still not sure what's the best way to combat "lousy question fatigue". *** Now having thoroughly defended us in our adolescent antics, I'm going to excoriate us just as thoroughly. For better or worse Chat is indexed by Google, and the transcripts are kept around for posterity. My own conduct, [as I noted][3], is certainly not something I'd put on my resume. I'm proud of some of the difficult and quirky questions I've answered on SF, but I wouldn't want an employer judging me based on the chat any more than I would with my [twitter feed][4] or [blog][5] (both with varying degrees of NSFW-ness). Similarly I can see how the current atmosphere may be intimidating -- While I feel we do try to be welcoming wandering in to a wall of memes and us grousing about lousy questions may be scaring some people off. We certainly don't want to be doing that. *** Unfortunately I don't really have any solutions to offer -- We could ask that chat transcripts not be google-indexed, or any number of other stopgaps, but ultimately I think we as a community need to decide what our "community standards" are (Chat regulars will note that the standards in SF chat are a little different than the rest of the SE network), and then enforce those standards on ourselves as we have with [comment snark][6] (meta search). [1]: http://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=fuck&user=5477&room=127 [2]: http://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=HALP!&user=&room=127 [3]: http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/2717476#2717476 [4]: http://twitter.com/voretaq7 [5]: http://bsd-box.net/~mikeg/blog/ [6]: https://meta.serverfault.com/search?q=snark