I missed most of the chat fireworks today, and it's been super busy so I haven't gone through the transcript yet, but...

I didn't see anything too terrible in there, although some might've been deleted by thetime I woke up.  I don't think the amount of profanity has been out of line, nor were any of the "oh yeah, top this" type of discussions (eg kittens "sleeping") offensive to me. (OTOH, I was one of the "crazy" off-topic guys who led to Joel shutting down most of his Joel on Software forums, so I guess my standards are suspect...)

I don't see anything wrong with chat being a place for some SF regulars to hang out and be themselves and apparently "being ourselves" includes thinking some highly innappropriate thoughts.  But so what?  Most of face the challenge day to day of dealing with people doing stupid things and usually not saying how stupid they are, compartmentalizing our serious side (on SF) from our hang out with our buddies side (on chat) is nothing new.

OTOOH, I guess there IS that precedent of Joel shutting down a forum that he thoughtgot outof hand, so maybe SE Inc. would do the same thing and we should be careful.

But then where will we talk about boobs?!?!?

EDIT: I wanted to comment on one of @Zoredache's thoughts:

> 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.

Although I can't think of any examples to cite, I feel that anyone new to SF who has wandered into chat - no matter what the reason - has largely been welcomed.  Maybe some of the problem here is that the person who was ticked off was thought to be enough of a "regular" and treated accordingly.