<p>This answer focuses entirely on the repeated encouragement to use chat. </p>

<p>I have glanced at chat and (more often) been encouraged by automatic prompts to move a conversation to chat, but I've always resisted. </p>

<p>I naturally have no objection to anyone using chat if they find it useful (or even entertaining) but chat to my mind has various disadvantages, at least for users like myself:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>What can be most valuable about threads is the diversity of suggestions, including frank disagreements about how to see or to tackle the problem. The comments system is already excellent and well suited to making smaller points, including those expressed a little more informally. </p></li>
<li><p>I have noticed that although chat is very visible if you seek it out, many people lose inhibitions they have in the forum, become digressive, personal, trivial and even offensive. (A recent poster made obnoxious remarks in chat about people who had tried to help him, but gave up frustrated.)  They also often become more inarticulate and write more poorly. The value of chat is thus very limited except for the people concerned at the time, so I really don't see that anyone should be encouraged to chat if they don't feel so inclined. (If you want to read this in reverse, and say "But that is what chat is for!" I agree, but it is not to my taste.) </p></li>
<li><p>Invitations to chat often come from inexperienced users, intent on one or two things only, getting an individual answer to a specific question (and often getting blessing for something they have already decided they want to do, usually in the form "Is this OK?"). Chat just distracts and detracts from the bigger goal of CV, building up an archive of good answers of use to a large number of people. </p></li>
</ol>

<p>(Using comments heavily does carry an obligation to clean up once a conversation is done, removing stuff made redundant by later edits, and so forth.) </p>
