About 6 weeks ago, Waze HQ told the Gobal Champs that WME Chat and Live users on the map would be discontinued. The reasons we were given were:

• Poor capabilities of WME Chat
• Low usage of WME Chat
• Increased use of external services like Slack & Discord

It turned out that this was misleading (to be polite) and doesn't cover Live Users being discontinued at all. Within 2 days, HQ had to admit the true situation. The infrastructure team are upgrading the login servers; as part of this, the new service will not be compatible with either chat or live users. To quote Ruben "In this case it was somewhat not fully expected also from our side." But I don't feel that was justification to give us other reasons whilst hiding the real one.

Needless to say, there were immediate, multiple, passionate objections to the loss of WME Chat. Poor as it is, it's still an important tool for contacting new editors and the value of having something integrated into WME, with no need for additional software/logins etc is inestimable. Nevertheless, there is nothing we can do about this. The infrastructure to support chat no longer exists.

The topic then turned to the future. Even the initial post mentioned the possibility of a better, integrated replacement to chat. Unfortunately that is going to be something for the future. Right now, they are only at the stage of gathering input/suggestions - and believe me, we have provided plenty of those. But we all know that Waze have a history of taking ages to start new features, then abandoning them before completion. All we can do is keep up at them about this one and hope something happens soon.

I call on HQ to begin a public discussion of the future of chat, including a summary of the suggestions so far. I would actually have no objections if they just moved the discussion topic in the GC forum into public view.

Why am I making this announcement? Because Waze HQ have not done so. They've announced it in the Global Champs and Coordinators forums. If they expect us to make the announcements for them - well this is what happens.

I would lastly like to apologise, personally, to the entire editing community. As a Global Champ, I was privy to this upcoming change and discussion. I didn't notice at the time, but they even told us it would happen in mid-October. So we should have spread the news to the rest of you, instead of it coming as a surprise.

I had hoped my 10,000th post would be for something more pleasant. I even had something planned.

[UPDATE]
Staff have posted an update later on this topic. The important part is this:

HeziBez wrote:The main reason for this deprecation is a Login Server upgrade. The new server is not backwards compatible and the current WME chat service will not be able to function.

Community feedback has clarified how important the WME chat is, so it will be rebuilt.
Rebuilding it in a way that's compatible with the new server requires rewriting most of the code so we cannot currently provide an ETA.
There will be a downtime between the deprecation of the current version and the release of the new one.

So before you post your reply on this thread, please bear in mind:

• WME Chat and Live Users will not return in their old form - the infrastructure is not there to support them.
• The Global Champs had already made their displeasure clear, and you have certainly done so on this topic!
• A replacement is being actively worked on but there will be a substantial time before it is ready.
• We can now usefully use this topic to make suggestions about how that replacement might work.