Help about chat rooms

Question

I've been hunting the SE help, and I can't find answers to these 2 questions:

• Can I create private chat rooms without using the gallery? The other day, I tried to create a chat w/ another user, but he posted a comment to a question I asked, on the regular site, saying "I don't see your badge". Apparently, I wasn't doing it correctly. I couldn't locate guidance on how to do this.
• After extended commenting, E puts up the warning "Move discussions to chat". Is there some way that I can manually move comments into a chat room prior to SE popping up that message?

Sorry, if I'm imposing by asking this. But, I honestly couldn't find the instructions to these items, anywhere.

Answer 1

You cannot create private rooms. You can use a gallery to limit who can talk in a room, but anybody can view it. Moderators can create private rooms when necessary for moderation purposes, but Stack Exchange isn't in the business of hosting private conversations generally. Sorry.

You can't move comments to chat. You can copy them one at a time, which I agree is tedious; the timestamp for a comment is also a link and comment links onebox, so pasting the links into a chatroom (one per message) will display the comments in chat. Even when the system "moves" comments to chat, what it's really doing is copying them -- moderators then have to delete the comments as a separate step.

"Copy comments to chat" sounds like a reasonable feature request; you might try it on Meta.SE. (I haven't searched to see if it's there already.) I don't think we want users to be able to move (i.e. delete from the post) other users' comments; that could be abused by somebody to make comments he disagrees with less visible. But I'm all for making it easier for users to continue a conversation in chat instead of in comments!

Related (MSE): Can we have an easier way to set up a chat room from a post?