Show who flagged a message in chat

Question

I'd really like to see that, in chat, flagged messages should show who flagged them. Right now, and this is far from the first time, there's some user flagging every message by a certain other user. This is incredibly annoying (not least because the flag system is very annoying, but that's another debate) because we have no idea who is doing it, so we can't request any action, and the user who is being flagged is being targetted with no capacity for any action.

Flagging can disrupt everybody, and excessive flagging is a disruptive behaviour, just as much as posting messages which genuinely deserve flagging. Users who engage in mass flagging campaigns should be removed from the chat.

Edit: This isn't just about excessive flagging. There are other times when there are unwarranted flags. We'd like to know who flags such things.

Answer 1

This is not going to happen – flagging is anonymous, after all. As for this particular case, I've talked to the user in question, they claim they where looking for some sort of "dislike feature" :\

I have suggested they post an answer here, but it looks like they have elected not to. And as I said in the comments, at least the "I disagree with this flag" feature has worked just fine in this case.

Regarding the question of some sort of "punishment" for users with many invalid flags, I'm open to suggestions. Here is some data, so we know what we're talking about.

This is a list of chat.SO users (anonymized, of course). The first column is the number of messages the user has flagged. The second colum is the percentage of these flagged messages that where subsequently deleted (either directly by a mod, or they were flagged by enough people). The third column is the percentage of this user's flags that had at least two normal users or one moderator counter-flag (i.e. "I disagree").

The table shows all users that have flagged at least five times, and whose value in the third column is above 50%.

+-------------+-----------+----------------+
| Total Flags | Success % | Disagreement % |
+-------------+-----------+----------------+
|           5 |         0 |            100 |
|           5 |         0 |             60 |
|          13 |         0 |            100 |
|           5 |         0 |            100 |
|          16 |         0 |            100 |
|          18 |         0 |             66 |
|          14 |         7 |             92 |
|          30 |        10 |             90 |
|          33 |        12 |             60 |
|           8 |        12 |            100 |
|          11 |        18 |             81 |
|          61 |        19 |             70 |
|           5 |        20 |             80 |
|           5 |        20 |             80 |
|           7 |        28 |             71 |
|          12 |        33 |             75 |
|           5 |        40 |             60 |
|           5 |        40 |             60 |
|          10 |        40 |             60 |
|           7 |        42 |             57 |
|          11 |        45 |             63 |
|          13 |        46 |             84 |
|          69 |        50 |             63 |
|           8 |        50 |             87 |
|         111 |        50 |             57 |
|          14 |        50 |             85 |
|          17 |        52 |             76 |
|          32 |        53 |             56 |
|          18 |        61 |             72 |
|           8 |        62 |             75 |
|          38 |        63 |             52 |
|           6 |        66 |             83 |
|           6 |        66 |             83 |
|          24 |        75 |             54 |
|          18 |        77 |             66 |
|          10 |        90 |             60 |
|          11 |        90 |             72 |
+-------------+-----------+----------------+

_{(Many thanks to Senseful for the great table formatter. Oh, and the user that sparked this discussion is the 18/0/66 row.)}

Thoughts?

Answer 2

I second what balpha and Michael Mrozek say: the problem is clear, but the solution certainly ain't showing who flagged what to everybody. Flags have to remain anonymous, exactly to avoid revenge trips against flagging users.

This said, I like to add to the analysis of balpha that it's not only about the number of invalid flags. You can work easily with a flag weight for chat messages as well, which will weed out those intolerant flaggers anyway.

But, it is in my eyes even more important to exclude users from chat that invariantly flag the same person over and over again for no reason. A temporary block for them seems a right thing to do, and a complete ban after multiple felonies so to say. I've seen it before in some other chatroom as well. I never could vote either in favor or against it, as the language of concern was something very far away from english. But it was obvious one of the users was not liked by somebody else. This should be tackled far quicker than a flag weight can do.