I while I agree that there are a lot of bad spect chat, and I may have done it wrong at times, I still think it is good on net to have spectator chat enable as default in the common public room.
The problem is that the community is too small and everyone have to play together, the new players and the top players. If we have enough players the new players can just play with each other and no one would say anything. But we don't.
So new players have to play with veterans, and it is very stressful for veterans to both manage their units and explain basic mechanics to new players [e.g. metal income is shared, overdrive, line move, storage is useless etc...]. I happened to have to fight 1v2 in a match while explaining to a player to stop building storage because they do not want energy to overflow.
In this case, spectators can calmly and expansively explain the mechanic to new players, responding to their questions.
Zero-k also has a lot of obscure knowledge not explicitly spelled out in the campaign, [e.g. wolverine [fire toward enemy]].
If we can alleviate this problem by some other means, I would not mind having spectator chat segregated.
