I was recently suspended in chat here on Meta.SE. I would like to know how I could have handled this situation better and avoided a suspension.
Link to transcript:
https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/rooms/89/conversation/suspended-due-to-a-flag
I was in the Tavern on the Meta chatroom here on Meta.SE. Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog asked for feedback on his proposed edits to the "What can I do..." question about the Post Ban. I provided one piece of constructive, kind feedback that I thought would be helpful:
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog on line 20, I would change "the fact that a question is deleted" to "the fact that you have deleted a question", considering that the answer you link to there is about self-deletion.
Shortly thereafter, Catija mentioned,
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog STOP EDITING MY POST!!!
and then Shog9 posted a message apparently expressing disapproval of the editing idea:
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog too elaborate to consider, too conservative to help
I was a bit surprised by Catija's comment seemingly claiming ownership of a community FAQ post with a post consisting of screaming (all caps) and lots of exclamation marks and flagged it.
Shortly thereafter, Shog9 posted a chat message:
If I have to query the database to figure out who flagged that, they're getting suspended. Just FYI
I was shocked by this statement and wasn't sure what to do, so I did what many people advise, I simply stepped back and took a deep breath. Shog9 then said:
so be it
I was then suspended from chat for one hour. Shog9 then said:
It's not spam, it's not offensive, it's not rude, or crude, or harassment, or a violation of the CoC, it's a request. To be honored or ignored or perhaps taken under advisement. But now I have to wait for someone else to handle it, so both of you are gonna wait until that happens.
How could I have handled this better? I'm not really asking about whether the flag I raised was the best, but about my behavior in general. What exactly was it that merited a suspension? Is simply raising a flag in chat that a moderator disagrees with worthy of a suspension? Do I have a particularly bad record of bad chat flags that has led to this (I don't recall receiving any sort of notification or warning about bad chat flagging)? Would confessing to @Shog9 have prevented me being chat-suspension-worthy (and what would have been the best way to do that - simply say "yes it was me", say it was me and beg for forgiveness, say it was me and try to explain, etc.)?
Sonic mentions that Catija was referring to editing a different post. Even if that is the case, I still feel the question is valid - the chat message appeared in the middle of a discussion about a major proposed edit in the works, and did include a somewhat strong assertion that some might consider a bit too much considering the apparent circumstances, even if the actual underlying motivation for the message was different than that which one might suspect given the immediate context.
Even if Catija's statement was not inappropriate, was flagging it for moderator attention in and of itself ban-worthy? I thought that the reason that we have flags is for moderators to investigate questionable situations and determine whether any rules have been violated and whether action is called for. If the moderator's ruling is that that message is not inappropriate for chat, I'm fine with a declined flag, but a little less comfortable with the idea that I am always one declined flag away from another chat suspension.
Update: Shog has apologized to both me and Sonic:
That said, I overreacted, and I owe both [Sonic] and @RobertColumbia an apology for that.