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It's almost a joke: even opening up the flag menu has a three-second cooldown.

Instead of making a request to view the flag options every time somebody opens the menu up, why aren't the menu options cached so that the request isn't made twice, thus removing the need for a cooldown?

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    Which options are available on the particular post depends on some moving parts, such as the status of a question in Triage or Close review. – user259867 May 5 '15 at 2:49
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    It's not supposed to take 3 seconds. What kind of connection are you on? – Adam Lear♦ May 5 '15 at 3:45
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    @Anna I assume he means the "you may only load the flag dialog every 3 seconds" message. I've had it once or twice if I've accidentally clicked outside the dialog and closed it and tried to re-open it straight away, not that it happens enough to be especially annoying. – PeterJ May 5 '15 at 5:19
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    I am done with this conservatist attitude toward everything. – oldmud0 May 5 '15 at 12:43
  • You know, these things are not to punish us, or because Stack staff are all sat around rubbing their hands in meetings wondering how else they can annoy us. It's for very necessary reasons! If they didn't limit or slow down certain things then they and/or other things from a knock-on effect would become flooded. The result of that would be things we click on likely have delays anyway from so many users clicking simultaneously. But then in an uncontrolled manner, as currently they setup in a controlled "balance" with the ability to tweak them if needed. – James May 5 '15 at 15:21
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    So much drama. Go outside. It's nice. – user1228 May 5 '15 at 16:19
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    @Won't Meh, you obviously don't live in the UK :( – James May 5 '15 at 22:11
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It's almost a joke: even opening up the flag menu has a three-second cooldown.

Why is it a "joke"? It stops users and bots from spamming buttons and links where there is no need for such fast actions.
Such delays are on various site functionality, as with the many users and vast array of functionality some limits are required to stop flooding.

Instead of making a request to view the flag options every time somebody opens the menu up, why aren't the menu options cached so that the request isn't made twice, thus removing the need for a cooldown?

The flag options can change depending on the post state, and whether you have already flagged/voted or not.
So certain things have to be checked each time you click them.

Otherwise we'd have issues such as:
You cache the flags, including a "close" flag option, but the question becomes closed after you cache it. Then you provide the option to flag/vote to close an already closed question.

Also, caching takes resources, and it would probably use more resources than it does just having a 3 second delay.

I think it works ok as it is to be honest.
These things are not meant for speedy use, so such delays don't impede usage or the functionality in any way.

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    The reason why I say that it is almost a joke is because there are enough things that already have a cooldown on the SE interface. Imagine one day that you saw a cooldown button on your Start menu or there was a limit to how many questions you could view every five minutes. Your same point could be used to support any of these UX disadvantages. – oldmud0 May 5 '15 at 3:15
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    There's only me who clicks my start menu. There are 4 million people clicking the same buttons on Stack Overflow. And we have unlimited question views because they instead limit things which are ok to be limited. Is there any reason why the limits are a problem to you? – James May 5 '15 at 4:30

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