Tell rate-limited users how long they have to wait before asking a new question

Question

New users are limited to one question per an hour, but once they'll hit this limit, all they see is You can only post once every 60 minutes. I think it would be very appreciate to change / extend this message, adding You need to wait next xx minutes. I saw similar solutions on many forums.

Would it be hard to implement something like that?

EDIT: It could be either added as extension to above mentioned warning message or as red-colored reminder above Title field. Or even as an explanation message, preventing user from clicking on a Ask Question button? Anything would be good, to not let user write the question (can be time consuming) only to hit the wall of limit. This can be a little bit annoying or frustrating, don't you think?

Answer 1

They have enough information to determine the exact time they can post again if they need it. All it requires is the existing message, You can only post once every 60 minutes and access to their user page, which will tell them when their last post was made.

When they receive the message all they need to do is look at a clock and wait 60 minutes. It may be that they can post sooner than that, but do they need to?

If someone wants to post more frequently than every hour, as a new user, chances are good they aren't really putting much effort in anyway.

So:

1. They can determine the time exactly if it's necessary
2. It's not necessary to do so if you simply wait 60 minutes as the message suggests
3. It's unlikely that they're putting in so much effort in that time frame that the next question will be a good question anyway, so trying to shorten the 70-100 minutes to exactly 60 minutes probably isn't useful to us or them

Lastly, while your suggestion may improve the user experience better for some certain types of users, you don't explain how it will improve the overall quality of the site. Will it improve questions? Answers?

Answer 2

I think that showing users how long they need to wait to ask a new question is a good idea for a few reasons.

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Consistency with other rate-limit notifications

According to The Complete Rate-Limiting Guide, nearly every rate-limit notification lets the user know how long they've been restricted from a specific action.

Time-specific notifications are shown for voting, comments, flagging, chat bookmarks, and accepting answers. I don't see a reason to exclude them for asking questions.

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Rate-limiting applies network-wide

With permission from site moderators^{(Workplace, Academia, ELU, Arduino, Code Golf)}, I have been posting meta-questions across multiple sites to test if YouTube embedding was enabled.

I initially came across the rate-limit while trying to test Android Enthusiasts. When I hit the limit, I checked my userpage as per Adam's advice, but my only question on the site was from over a month ago.

Later I realized that my rate-limit was from a post I had made 30 minutes ago on Arduino.

_{Fun fact: Stack Exchange gets very suspicious when cross-posting a question with multiple external URLs and HTML tags across multiple sites in a short timespan.}

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It's convenient

As Adam noted, if a user really needs to know how long they need to wait again, they can simply look at their user profile.

If that's the case, showing how long users need to wait isn't giving away any information they wouldn't already have access to. It's simply making the information a bit more conveniently accessible.

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TL;DR: While this isn't a critical feature by any means, it would be a nice quality of life improvement. I don't see any reason not to add it.