YES, COMMON FOLKS OF DEVIANTART. IT IS TRUE.

The Tea Garden is nothing more than a shrine to =Endling and a glorious monument to the bourgeoise of deviantArt! If you have no talent? Not allowed! If you have no pageviews? Turned away at the door! If you don't have one of the Magical Chatspeak Icons and request entry? WE WILL BRICK YOU IN THE FACE.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the no-holds-barred, no-stone-unturned, tell-all inside story from someone who actually is a member of the chatroom: Yours bloody truly.

The truth about the Tea Garden is this:
It is buried in a mountainside so secret, not even the dwarvic runes speak of it. Only uttered in the purest tongue of the Makers of the World is its true name. Through the fire and the flames you must brave your way to the doorstep, only to read the words chiseled into the bedrock by time itself:

HERE THERE BE DORKS.

It's not a seekrit clubhouse, guys, nor is it Mysterious Elite Artist Wonderland, nor is it your mother's book club. (Although I may have had some in-depth passage analysis for her last night.) (Oh snaps!)

Is it invite-only? Yeah. Is it because we don't want the dA proletariat soiling our tasteful doilies? Like hell. It's because we like having a nice, (relatively) quiet chatroom to hang out with some cool people we've met here on dA. There's no "Your pageviews must be THIS colossal to ride" requirement, no gossip circles, no guffawing loudly over the trials of the "common deviant." Art feedback? Sure. Chat about the pros and cons of upcoming and existing video games? Yeah. General licentiousness and debauchery? Hoo yeah. (I never said we were role models.)

A country club, it ain't, folks. But a neat place, it is. Neat and tidy, and we like it that way. So keep your mudslinging to your own private chat room, and we'll keep our cackling over the plight of the internet peasantry to ours.