I understand that I can simply ask that a discussion in comments be moved to chat, and then go to chat, but it looks like the automatic prompt does a lot more (room creation, tagging, title, inviting, etc), and while it triggers on its own after several comments, sometimes I'm relatively sure ahead of time that we'll get to the room prompt with how the discussion is going.
Is there a way to make the prompt accessible sooner than normal?
Akixkisu, Someone_Evil, and I took to vandalizing one of my answers, and we could not get the prompt until Someone_Evil stopped commenting and Akixkisu and I did a three-pair exchange (full comment thread is documented here).
After four cycles of (Ak, S_E, TM), still no prompt, then after the pairs from Akixkisu and I, Akixkisu got the prompt.
So how can you get to the prompt quicker? If there are three people engaging in the discussion, ask one of them to stop commenting for a moment so you can get to the chat prompt, where they can then resume discussion.
Or just custom flag a comment asking a mod to migrate the thread. That will be favorable, as all the comments will be preserved rather than just the ones between the two users who triggered the user prompt.
You can create a chat room individually, invite the other user there, and post that link in the comment section. Or you do an uninterrupted ababab comment chain, followed by a prompt for moving the discussion to chat - those are your reliable options. Either you invite them to a chatroom that you create, you ask a mod via a flag, or you go through three iterations of uninterrupted comment exchanges to reliably get there.
Deleted comments in chains count for the three uninterrupted pairs of comments exchange.
Thomas Markov and I did one rapid commenting test, it took us three completed pairs of comments, and the 7th comment would move the discussion to chat; both of us had the prompt after three completed pairs. After that, we tested together with Someone_Evil whether we could use an abc approach. Even after my fourth comment in the chain, we got no prompt. Then we changed to pairs again in the same comment thread, and the three pairs did the trick again, but only I received the prompt as the starter of that chain.
So your best bet is to have an uninterrupted comment chain of three pairs. You might want to tell anybody else to abstain from interrupting your conversation.
This is the most recent feature-request to change something about the status quo: Can the chat message pop-up be inserted after 5 comment "back and forth" argument strategies?
This discussion on our meta goes into why we don't have an autogenerate button for moving comments to chat.
This is the most longstanding and voted-on feature request for an on-demand button: Should "move-to-chat" be provided on demand (as a button perhaps)?
A Community Manager, Catija, explained how it works in these network posts:
Quoting Catija's response from this second link:
I had the opportunity to answer a similar question on the Code Review meta a while back and got one of the devs to look up how we do this - the rules are pretty simple:
The link appears when two people are having a conversation with each other. So, you need exactly two people who have written at least three comments each (four on meta sites) within a four hour period. If a third (or fourth) person joins the discussion - then it won't trigger.
That doesn't mean that any additional person on the chat thread will prevent it, only in that period of six messages.
So this would trigger it (if it all happened in four hours):
Person 1, Person 2, P1, P1, P2, P2, P1
But this wouldn't:
Person 1, Person 2, P1, P1, P2, Person 3, P2, P1
Person 3 acts as a combo breaker and resets the count.
"Conversation" may be a bit specific, now that I think about it - the system doesn't care whether the two people are talking to each other - they could be both giving guidance to the OP and not interacting with each other at all but still get the encouragement to move to chat.
