@Martin hi have seen you in here & thx for keeping this room alive. heres an even better idea, build up audience via a community ad to the chat room. do you know a few ppl who would vote for one for this room? recently pulled it off for another site, eg below, have some experience with it but need "accomplices" :)
Community Promotion Ads seem to be a useful tool for helping spread various links that might be useful for users of the site.
I have mostly encountered them at MSE. I have learned several interesting things from them and I consider them useful. I do not know much about usage of them on other si...
Basically I think it's up to the MO community. They do not feel the need to use the main chat room a lot. And it is perfectly ok.
I think that there is a good reason for keeping one general chatroom alive. (Which is why I occasionally post at least something here.)
The system keeps one room associated with the main site alive, even if it is inactive for a long period of time. Here on MO the most active room is clearly Homotopy Theory: chat.stackexchange.com/…
So if we do nothing, other room would probably be frozen by now.
From time to time somebody comes here to ask for some advice. (Is this question suitable for MO? How can I reopen my question? How do I contact mods? And similar question.)
I think that such questions would be off-topic in Homotopy Theory chatroom.
This could be solved easily by associating this room to meta.MO rather than MO. (The system would keep at least one room associated with MO and at least one room associated with meta.MO alive.)
But some time ago the only room associated with meta.MO was frozen and deleted. I don't think it is possible to create a new room associated with meta.MO anymore.
TL;DR The only reason for keeping this room alive is that it might be useful to have one general room. (As opposed to rooms devoted to some specific topics.) If there is no need for extensive use of chat in the MathOverflow community, I do not see any reason to try to change it "artificially".
