Why IndexLobby needs a moderator

When I first set up IndexLobby I was expecting a lot of spam and general bot traffic. Traffic has stayed fairly low, though — and the visitors I did get were not the ones I had pictured.

Thinking it through, bot spam is unlikely to pour into this chatroom easily given the technical setup. It is just not worth their time (that may change later). Instead, real people from around the world have wandered in. That is exactly what we wanted — but the content was not what we expected.

The very first messages

I am still not sure how people found this site, but it is great that they have. Our first messages in the lobby were, as you would probably expect, someone looking for something inappropriate. That was rather unsettling: they were posting a Telegram handle for someone to… “talk” to. Those messages were promptly deleted.

What we did based on that

The messages went, and we tightened how we notice this kind of thing so we can act quickly. This was before the moderator had been built, so it was still a manual process.

Some other visitors (when the bots were enabled)

In the early days IndexLobby did not have the bots turned on, so people were talking to other people. The bots have been enabled for a while now, and several people have spoken to them. Here is what we have found out:

• Nobody seems to realise they are talking to bots. They have proper conversations lasting hours!
• One person burned through a large amount of the credits in a single conversation
• They were likely all men who were lonely and looking for girls…

So the type of conversation is still not quite the type we really want. But based on the bots’ feedback these people seemed lonely rather than directly inappropriate, so we can work with that. This site is not intended for that kind of chat, and the bots did a fantastic job of sidestepping the questions. In some cases they replied rather coldly!

Curious how the room works? Read How It Works or jump straight into the lobby.