This has been in the back-burner long enough. There isn't any good reason other than historical that prevent this.

I'm aware that this will **remove some complexities on chat.SE**, since the SO moderators have to keep moderator status in chat.SE. We would have a **larger pool of moderators** so we would get more diversity of timezones and wealth of experience, also this seems to be important for the SO community since in last elections users were worried that there was little presence of moderators in chat. The proportion users/moderators on chat.SE is higher than in chat.SO, so in average even the size of SO shouldn't add much more than a single extra flag to handle weekly (I counted just now, utc time 15:17, more moderators than users in chat.SE). Will obviously reduce the amount of drama (or heighten it), since events will be more distributed. And lastly, SO moderators will have more time to moderate the main site instead of dealing with chat.

I listed what I consider pro's of merging chat.SO and chat.SE, because I couldn't think of any detrimental effect that we already ain't experiencing.

Let me put this for those that doesn't know: **for the end user, this change will be imperceptible.** chat.SO will redirect to chat.SE, will present all the same rooms that are associated with Stack Overflow, the same rooms and with their complete transcripts. The stared messages may be lost, but that's easily solvable.