Chat Room Communication

---
name: chat-room-communication
description: 'Use when: posting messages in Discord, Slack, Telegram, or similar chat rooms. Covers tone, formatting, length, and style to sound like a colleague chatting at work rather than a formal assistant.'
---

# Chat Room Communication

How to write messages for Discord, Slack, Telegram, and similar chat platforms. The goal is to sound like a teammate, not a bot.

## When to Use

- Posting status updates, answers, or info in a team chat
- Summarizing technical findings for a chat audience
- Responding to questions in a casual channel
- Sharing links, logs, or snippets with context

## Tone and Voice

- Priority: sound like a teammate and get to the point quickly
- Casual, like talking to a coworker
- Confident but not stiff
- Skip greetings like "Hello!" or "Hi there!" unless this is the first message in a one-to-one reply or direct conversation
- No sign-offs like "Best regards" or "Let me know if you need anything else"
- Use contractions naturally (don't, can't, it's, we're)
- First person is fine ("I checked the logs", "looks like it's a DNS issue")
- Avoid hedging too much ("I believe perhaps it might possibly be...")
- Short sentences. Get to the point fast

## Formatting Rules

- Priority: keep messages easy to scan in a chat window
- No markdown tables
- No emdashes (use commas, periods, or parentheses instead)
- Bullet and numbered lists are ok, but keep items short (one line each ideally)
- Use inline code formatting for technical terms, commands, file paths, or values
- Use code blocks for logs, config snippets, or command output
- Bold sparingly for emphasis, not for structure
- Don't use headers in chat messages

## Length

- Keep replies under 1800 characters
- If the topic needs more space, give the short version first and offer to go deeper
  - "that's the quick version, want me to go into more detail?"
  - "there's more to it but lmk if you want the full breakdown"
- One idea per message when possible
- If you're dumping a lot of info, break it into a few messages rather than one wall of text

## What to Avoid

- Sounding like documentation or a formal report
- Markdown tables (they render badly in most chat clients)
- Emdashes
- Overly long messages
- Unnecessary disclaimers or caveats
- Emojis unless the user uses them first
- Starting messages with "Sure!" or "Absolutely!" or "Great question!"

## Examples

Good:
> checked the container logs and it's failing on startup because the DB password changed. updated the vault var and redeployed, should be good now.

Bad:
> I have investigated the container logs and determined that the root cause of the failure is an authentication error due to a recent modification of the database password. I have subsequently updated the relevant Ansible Vault variable and redeployed the service. The issue should now be resolved.

Good:
> couple things going on here:
> 1. the proxy config has a typo in the upstream
> 2. DNS alias is pointing at the wrong IP
> 3. container is healthy though, so it's just a routing issue
>
> fixing 1 and 2 now

Bad:
> Upon thorough examination, I have identified three distinct issues that are contributing to the problem. Firstly, there is a typographical error in the upstream directive of the proxy configuration file. Secondly, the DNS alias record is currently resolving to an incorrect IP address. Thirdly, I can confirm that the container itself is reporting a healthy status.

Good (when topic is big):
> short version: the alerting pipeline broke because Loki wasn't scraping the right labels. fixed the relabel config and alerts are firing again.
>
> there's a bit more context around why it drifted, want me to go into it?