Suppose I see a post in the chat room that I think is potentially inflammatory, what is the best way to bring it to a moderator's attention?
Flagging seems a near nuclear option, and I've been specifically told not to do this by a chat moderator (not one of our home grown ones). I can use an @moderator in a message, but I may want to keep quiet the fact I'm flagging other users' posts - partly from cowardice of course but partly to avoid inflaming things further.
So is there a way/what is the best way discreetly to tell the moderators there is a post in the chat room that they may want to look at?
A quick footnote:
We've probably all been in situations where we can tell a conversation is about to turn nasty, but nothing offensive has been said yet. Nipping such exchanges in the bud is usually the best way to keep things from getting heated. However the last time I attempted this I was told:
Flagging isn't for when someone says something that might turn the conversation unpleasant. It's for after the conversation has already turned unpleasant in spite of attempts to remediate.
I think the point is that flagging notifies all chat room mods across the entire SE, and since they're strangers to the Physics chat they can't know why an apparently innocuous comment could start a fire. That makes flagging pretty useless in this context, but that's is the way the SE chat is designed and there's nothing we can do about it.
My question was how to notify just the Physics mods, who will know enough of the background to judge if a comment should be removed.
