Chat oneboxes kind of a lot of things - many SE features, images, twitter feeds, etc.
This is a great feature. However, sometimes it's not so great. Many times I find myself in the position where something is oneboxed that I don't really care for. There are many reasons for this:
- It's not offensive, but it's also not appropriate for me, where I am, or what I'm doing.
- It's too large and/or there are too many of them, and interrupts a conversation I'm trying to have.
- The content is merely annoying to me, such as an image that is hard to look at, or a long animated gif that won't stop looping.
(Sorry to pick on Ben, I was looking for that awful 'highlight' image and pulled stuff he oneboxed as examples while I looked for it :P)
In these cases, flagging is not really appropriate. I could ask someone to edit it to a URL (or ask a mod, or in my case, do it myself :P) but this is kind of a poor solution. Other people might be interested in the content, or having their own conversation to which the oneboxed content is appropriate.
I'd like some way to "un-onebox" an item. That is, some button or method to replace the oneboxed content with the URL, or collapse it with some placeholder that could be clicked to view the content.
Ideally, I could preemptively "un-onebox" things I don't care about, or items from users that consistently post content I'm not interested in. For example, perhaps I don't want twitter or amazon to onebox on my chat, or I know that a particular person is highly likely to post things I'm uninterested in.
I've been considering doing this myself somehow, but reverse engineering the minified chat system is kind of painful. People seemed to react positively to the concept, however.
