Is it okay to repeatedly disrupt conversation in the chat room by posting images?

Question

I was surprised to find out that it's not against the rules to repeatedly post images to the chat room to disrupt the ongoing conversation as long as the image is not an advertisement.

I'm especially talking about messages like these:

https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/45070687#45070687 https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/45052657#45052657 https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/45053817#45053817

And no, I'm not complaining about someone discovering the "this is fine" easter egg, I can totally understand that someone wants to try it out.

This question was prompted by yet another completely disruptive message which has since been deleted.

I was told by a moderator that it's room dependent how this stuff is handled. What's our take on this?

Answer 1

In general it is fine to post images, even repeatedly.

However, it is not fine to disrupt the chat (particularly away from on-topic game-development stuff in our case) or annoy others in the chat. So if at any point any otherwise-acceptable behavior starts to become a nuisance, it would be appropriate to:

• ask the offending user to stop, and explain why
• ask a room owner to intervene
• contact a site moderator
• flag the offending posts

(in that order, probably; note that the last option in particular is a "nuclear option" because it will go out to all 10k users and moderators on the network, which is probably more than is really necessary unless the images are particularly egregious.)

Answer 2

I remember in high school once at the beginning of a school year where the student sitting in front of me kept banging his chair on my desk. I asked why, and he said sorry, that he used to have a wall behind him, where he could bang into, and that he did not realize that this now would annoy someone. He stopped banging his chair on my desk.

Josh is right, it is not fine to disrupt the chat.

However, they might not be aware that they are disrupting the chat or being annoying, that's why they should be asked nicely to stop, and explain why (yes, that's the first step Josh mentioned).

Another option: the chat offers an ignore this user feature, available when clicking on the offending user's name in chat. When all else fails, there always this option that can be used. (But I honestly hope that this does not become the de facto solution.)