In the past few days, while visiting our chat room, I've received two notifications about spam/offensive flags in other chat rooms: I am attaching a screen capture of one such notification:
Apparently some other members have received similar notifications. Why is this happening? Is it a new feature or a bug? If it is a feature, it is one I definitively don't want and I would like to somehow disable it (I consider those messages a little bit annoying.)
This has always been the case for users with a network-wide reputation greater than 10.000. At this point you have the ability to see spam/offensive flags in chat. Those flags are global, they are not restricted to any specific room but shown to all 10k users and mods on the entire SE 2.0 chat.
If you do not wish to act on any chat flags you can safely ignore that indicator, chat flags are usually dealt with quickly and should disappear soon.
You might be interested in the following feature requests to either allow opting-out of chat flagging entirely or to not show the chat flags immediately to users in completely unrelated rooms:
We moderators get this notifications already since quite a time. Maybe high-rep users (in total rep) can now vote on them, too. It's a little confusing and a lot more annoying.
The reason is, I guess, that the chat is kind of a realm for itself and is not limited to the main sites the particular chat room you are in is linked. You have a own chat Id for example, which you got AFAIK when entering the chat the first time. Also my moderator powers seem to work in other sites chat-room as well. Recently I could unlock a Skeptics.SE chat room without any issue.
