Why is Chat _Chat?

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It's always annoyed me. It looks untidy.

I've always wondered that.

Somethinggggg to do with active convos used to be listed alphabetically and all the "chat" topics clogged it up, so they called it _Chat so they went to the bottom.

I think.

I don't get it.

What is a _ called anyway?

oh now I see it, well spotted
I hadn't noticed.

Underscore?

Sorry- I ramble. Because the letter c is high up the aloha bet, chat topics were always at the top of the list, so other threads got overlooked. By calling it _chat, it sent the chat topics to the bottom in active convos so you had to scroll past the other topics to get to chat, which kept the other topics a bit busier as people would be more likely to see them and post.

I THINK.

and "aloha bet" = "alphabet" obvs.

Ah, underscore, of course.

So the _ is now redundant?

Hello Tech can you lop the _ off Chat please? It bothers me. Thank you

I wondered this too. If you want to advanced search for something specifically in _chat you have to scroll past a billion topics including all the local ones to get to it, which is annoying.

It's to do with alphabetical sorting, so anything with an underscore goes after the normal A-Z.

Similarly, if you look at the A-Z list of topics you'll see that Forces' Sweethearts is right at the top - above the A's - because it's actually listed as "Forces. Presumably the " makes it superior to A, IYSWIM?

So why does " put something at the top of a list and _ put something at the bottom?

That's weird, because at work I often prefix file names with a _ so that they appear at the top.

I always assumed it was an alphabetising thing but it does look untidy.

I don't know. Perhaps Tech has customised the alphabetical sorting differently?

Yup, AhoyMcCoy is right - it was because people tended to see 'Chat' and nothing else, so all sorts of threads were getting put in there.

It's to do with how computers sort things. Every character - letters, digits, punctuation - is identified by a different number. For historical reasons (that I could bore you insensible about if required but that is explained here) it ended up that the order of characters was:

some punctuation characters one of which is "
Numerical digits 0-9
a few more punctuation characters
Capital Letters in alphabetical order
even more punctuation one of which is _
lower-case letters in alphabetical order
and a few more bits of punctuation

When a computer does a simple sort it uses this order. Hence why something beginning with double quotes goes first and something starting with an underscore ends up after everything starting with a capital letter.