Question: Is there a way to hide specific messages in chat?

Sometimes people send things to chat channels that I personally find offensive or cause distress, the only option I can find is to hide all posts by the user that posted the message. or to flag the message for mods to deal with. I can imagine that mods have better things to do than moderate chat messages that I personally have a problem with, that might not bother other people. 

I would prefer a way to hide just specific messages, so that I can still see what a user is saying but without the one or two messages that hurt my eyes, and without getting moderators involved.

Is there a way to do this? If not, what avenue should I pursue in order to suggest it to be added to the chat functionality of the site.

Answer: 
There are some other "workarounds" for this in the mean time (this request just came up again recently):

* Ask an RO to move the message somewhere else. If it's within the message edit time limit you could also ask the person who posted it to remove it, if you're comfortable with that.
* In rooms with lots of activity, wait until the message scrolls off the screen, optionally temporarily ignoring the user while you wait.
* If you have AdBlock installed, you can block specific images by right-clicking and adjusting the slider to an appropriate level that blocks that particular URL ([demo](https://i.stack.imgur.com/v4iyt.gif)).
* Write a userscript to do it and contribute it to <http://stackapps.com>! There [might even be something there already](https://stackapps.com/search?q=%5Bchat%5D+hide).
If a message is truly offensive, just flag as spam/offensive. You don't want to simply hide such stuff for yourself, but remove it for all users.

There is no way to hide individual messages without a user script or something like that.