chatroom

Chatroom is an online space where people can engage in real-time text conversations within a shared virtual room. It is a core component of many chat systems, group messaging platforms, and online communities. A room typically has a name or topic and supports multiple participants who can send messages that are delivered to others in the same room.

Early chatrooms emerged with Internet Relay Chat (IRC) in the late 1980s, offering channel-based rooms on centralized networks. The web era introduced browser-based chat rooms and then mobile-friendly clients. Modern chat platforms use persistent rooms, new protocols, and sometimes end-to-end encryption for direct messaging; many also support asynchronous messaging, bots, file sharing, and search.

Rooms provide access controls (public, private, invite-only), moderation tools (mutes, bans, message deletion), topic lines, message history, and presence indicators showing who is online.

Implementation varies: IRC, XMPP, and Matrix have chat room concepts; contemporary services often use WebSocket or long polling to push messages to clients; servers host rooms and route messages; clients connect to servers and join rooms. Some rooms are persistent, others are ephemeral.

Common uses include community discussion, customer support channels, collaborative workspaces, gaming lobbies, and education. Notable platforms include IRC networks, Slack channels, Discord servers, and Microsoft Teams channels.

Security concerns include moderation, spam, harassment, data retention, and network eavesdropping; transport-layer encryption (TLS) protects data in transit; end-to-end encryption is less common for group chat rooms.