Let me opt out of viewing chat flags

Question

I'm not a moderator. I have ~50k rep on Server Fault. I am a regular in chat.

Because chat allows all 10k+ users across the network to act on chat flags, I (and many other regulars in SF chat) see some problematic users from other chats flagging things that aren't actually offensive.

I disagree with the current chat moderation model where anyone from any community with enough rep can vote on small snippets of text that provide no context. I think that's a bad system. It's been brought up time and again that there must be a better way to handle it, but nothing has happened to date.

If the global chat moderation system won't be re-thought, I would like to be given a way to opt out of seeing chat flags that originate from outside rooms that I'm currently in.

I was never elected as a mod, I never asked to be able to see them, and they get on my nerves.

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TL;DR - I don't want to see chat flags from rooms that I'm not in. Let me opt out of seeing them.​​​​​​​​​

Answer 1

An opt-out for rooms you aren't in / have never been in seems reasonable to me.

As a 10K user who was a regular in chat long before I became a moderator I can attest to how annoying out-of-band flags can be. The frequency of flagging in certain rooms has also increased, and at least in The Comms Room there's a generally negative attitude toward dealing with the "flag noise" that I don't think is constructive for community moderation.

I know this goes against the "offensive stuff on chat needs to be handled quickly" argument, but allowing 10k users to opt out of flag handling for chats they're not in should at least avoid frustrating regular users who are burned out on flag noise, and avoids the possibility of people dealing with flags out of frustration rather than on their merits.

Answer 2

The chat flagging system should be improved. It would be nice to see MDMarra's suggestion here adopted.

It would also be nice if the flags, for those who do try to deal with them, easily enabled you to see a comment in context before dealing with it. Sometimes it's obvious why something was flagged. Sometimes it's less obvious. And that's without even getting into the thorny issue of the 'culture' of different chat rooms.

If the flags are important enough to have at all, then surely they're important enough to be improved to make them more useful and more relevant. The suggestion of just ignoring flags that was made in comments to the original question seems like its ignoring the chance to make flags more useful, by making sure that the people who see them have at least some interest in the room in which the flag was raised, and therefore possibly more interest in dealing with those flags.

Answer 3

Here's the problem: I am mostly in The Bridge, the gaming chat. I see chat flags from the Russian, Chinese, Spanish, French, Ukrainian, Latin, Korean, Italian, Esperanto, Japanese and Portuguese stacks. I don't speak any of these languages and don't want to learn them either, yet I am still asked to review chat flags from these stacks.

I don't know what they are saying. It could be a dumb joke, it could be insults thrown at each other, or they could be conspiring to end democracy. I just don't know. I am just not qualified to review these messages, and I'm fairly sure that the vast majority of the other chat users are in the same situation, simply because they don't know what is being said.

I don't want to press valid or invalid, because of the chance of false positives. and if enough people press "Not Sure", the flag gets invalidated as well, so I don't really see how that's an option either.

At the very least make it so that chat flags for any of the language related stacks are restricted to those stack. Those are the only people who can be considered qualified to properly moderate such flags.

Answer 4

A simple workaround for this is to hide the flag-count element, e.g. with the following CSS:

#flag-count {
    display: none !important
}

This should work with any custom stylesheet browser extension (but be careful which one you install). This will hide all chat flags, including from rooms where you're currently in, but the blue 'flash' at the right end of a flagged message will still be shown.