All channels have a URL. The quality of the content is not worse than in the topics. I think it’s time to add a setting to make them publicly available and indexed by search engines
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I split this out into a separate topic so folks who feel like they’d benefit from making chat channels publicly visible can chime in and share more about how they imagine that working for their communities (and folks who would prefer to keep chat private by default can do the same).
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I don’t think chats are worth of indexing. If there is some such content moving those to topics in public category is right move.
But we could show names of public chat channels to all visitor as a teaser — content of chats must follow visibility rules of groups, though, as categories do.
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Note that currently we don’t show contents of chat channels to any visitors, even if topics in the category are visible to them.
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Are there any popular chat services that are indexed by search engines? it seems a bit contrary to what chat is meant to be (temporary, informal) — so I’m curious if anyone does it well to counter that idea.
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No we don’t, and that’s how it should be and stay. But if there is need to let googlebot in and index… then we have to expose chats totally and that isn’t that good situation.
But, we could show names of chat channels as an ad to show what we can offer. We have public categories so everyone, even totally new ones, knows right away what they can expect. But chat is quite abstract in this context and to realize there is such possibility they should read like FAQ (or similar), and they don’t read 
So, as I said: showing names, titles, of chat channels allowed to everyone, no matter if using chats is limited to like >TL1, would act as a teaser.
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I know many administrators of public telegram channels who dream of having their channels indexed by search engines. Only by implementing this experimental function, you can understand how useful it is for the community. The question is not whether to do it or not. The question is that community owners themselves have the right to decide what to open for public access and what to prohibit. Let the commentators leave their opinion in the settings of their communities
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I feel there are a bunch of items here hiding in this request:
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Allow anonymous users to know a channel exists: eg: All Star - Discord Servers
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Allow anonymous users to see the content of a specific channel (Eg: twitch)
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Allow search engines to see content of a specific channel. (not finding too many examples)
I feel like (1) alone gives tremendous mileage. (2) can be interesting (3) feels like the riskiest play due to low quality content.
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Not all channels may have low quality content. It all depends on the community and the topic, for example, this channel can be opened for indexing
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What do you think — how would Google show a chat message in search results? And after that — how would it affect to ranking of a site?
For Google, there is no difference between a channel and a topic. Topics can also be very large. The more content, the better for search results. I think this will have a positive impact on search results, especially if the channel is active and the community is literate. Of course, everything needs to be tested in order to draw the right conclusions. And not all channels should be open. But there are topics where users can write anything (topics for flooding, off-topic communication, etc.), but no one closes them from search engines. In any case, this will have a positive impact on visibility in search engines
I hate to say this and that’s why I’m bailing out from this topic — but you are so badly wrong. You can do a plugin and expose your chat channels to googlebot and what happends to your ranking and search budget after that. But before that… take a look how AND what google sees.
I really hope CDCK doensn’t help admins to purposely harm themselves and continue to keep Google out of chats.
This is a matter for administrators, which should be publicly available.
Hello! I just found this thread and I like the idea of giving access to channels to anonymous users. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
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Zulip has public chat channels. For example - https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/
Here an article about their release - Introducing the Zulip public access option for open communities
Public chat channels can be quite handy for open communities.
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The chat channel looks more like a topic than a messenger channel, which usually does not have a web version. Therefore, this is the first thing after the topic that requires indexing by search engines. After all, it did not occur to anyone to close all topics on the forum from indexing
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I would like to have discourse chat to allow anonymous and guest visitors to PMs, and communicate in public and private group channels.
This is going to create a huge engagement for each community.
Here is the sample site which is using anonymous chat which is bringing great engagement point of view
You can see the power of anonymous and logged out guest chat that users love to participate in.
This feature should also allow anonymous uses to participate in audio and video voice calls send voice messages file uploads etc. of course the moderators should be able to mute and ban and spam or rate limit the anonymous or logged in visitors who are participating in the chat channels DMs or public channels.
I would really love to see this feature integrated in discourse chat official plugin, to let anonymous uses participate in the chat exactly as a logged in visitor.
Also I have a question is the discourse chat plugin compatible to handle concurrent online users of up to 5,000+ or 10,000+?
Perhaps you guys should make use of node js and socket.io software behind the scenes to handle high traffic on chat plugin.
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