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This is more of a nuisance than a real show stopper, but given that it's probably a quick fix (a tweak of a variable somewhere), I figure it doesn't hurt to ask.

Currently, the throttle on moderator messages is you can only send one every 30 seconds.

A lot of times, when there's a sock ring or anything that warrants a moderator message for multiple people, I've already spent a considerable amount of time doing the investigation, and I have a number of tabs open to profiles ready to send them out.

However, after I send the first one, I have to wait 30 seconds to send the next one. But usually, during that thirty seconds, I have other things to do, may be distracted, etc, and I might miss sending out the mod message.

Given that for any one site, there are only 15 (that's the max number of moderators for any site, which is Stack Overflow) people max who are going to use this (also add employees of SE), it's still a very low number of people to place such a limiting, large throttle delay on.

I recommend that it be removed, or, made very, very small (allow me to perform this action every one to five seconds) so as not to interfere with the workflow of the moderators.

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  • 7
    I'm flagging this as spam. You filthy spammer. – BoltClock's a Unicorn Feb 6 '13 at 13:01
  • I think the purpose of a throttle like this is to reduce the impact of a rogue moderator or an infrastructure bug (e.g. JS code trapped in a loop where it submits the same message over and over again). But here the throttle is wrong, it should be a rolling one (e.g. no more than 10 per 5 minutes or something like that). – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 6 '13 at 13:10
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    @Gilles I'm not drawing a hard line on the specifics, point being, don't kill my workflow. How rogue can one really go? While used daily and multiple times on Stack Overflow, the volume here is actually easily managable even without a throttle, I imagine. – casperOne Feb 6 '13 at 13:25
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    If they removing the ratelimit, it may be nice to include a popup notification when messaging a user who has been messaged in the past half hour. Something that may not come to the notice of another mod simultaneously investigating it (as I understand it, you SO mods don't discuss each and every mod message before sending it out) – Manishearth Feb 6 '13 at 13:32
  • @Manishearth: That's a great suggestion. I often get paranoid about that sort of thing when contacting users while I know other mods are processing the queue. – BoltClock's a Unicorn Feb 6 '13 at 13:34
  • Aren't there captchas you can hit during this too? – Ben Brocka Feb 6 '13 at 14:00
  • @Manishearth It's a good suggestion, I'd add it as a feature request. We have some sort of notification on the profile page (from which all mod messages originate), but it's easily skipped over. – casperOne Feb 6 '13 at 14:13
  • @BenBrocka I've hit it once, yes, but not this time. – casperOne Feb 6 '13 at 14:13
  • @casperOne: Yeah, and that's missed while composing the message (when you've already scrolled down and your inbox isn't visible) – Manishearth Feb 6 '13 at 14:19

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