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This is low priority - it is about removing an irritating feature.

I get caught out regularly by the timers on the Overflow sites when I'm doing completely legit activity:

  1. Voting on comments: many are quite short - it is easy to read and vote on in well under 5 seconds
  2. At Area 51 I wanted to add text asking for an explanation of "not a good example" votes in multiple Q&As - this I did by opening multiple tabs and using copy / paste. No problem you would think because the voters are (presumably) by different people. But I can only do this every 15 seconds - which is irritating.

Suggestion: disable the timers for people above a certain reputation. We allow them more powerful rights like editing and closing posts (by presumably assuming good faith at a certain rep). So how about assuming good faith here for a relatively trivial (but sometimes very annoying) issue?

What do people think?

Update: At Area 51 there is no timer for voting on on- or off-topic questions! Seems strange to miss that out when comments do have a timer.

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    I think this is a dupe and I think it will be declined like every other suggestion regarding eliminating time limits.
    – Ladybug Killer
    Aug 8, 2010 at 9:52

1 Answer 1

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Disabling them completely is a bad idea. Even people with a lot of reputation could still decide to abuse the system.

How about this instead: initially lower but increasing limits. A few operations should be allowed in quick succession, but if you start to hammer the system then the limits should become harsher. If you stop, the limits should slowly cool off again.

There's quite a few times when I read an entire converstaion first and then afterwards decide which comments to vote up and nearly always get hit by the 5 second limit. It's a bit annoying to have a limit there when I'm only planning to make two or three votes anyway.

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    thanks for the reply. I'm glad you've posted another suggestion (rather than, e.g., just disagreeing), very constructive. However I think your suggestion is unnecessarily complicated. If we trust people on a higher rep with bigger things (like closing questions), surely we can trust them with smaller things - like not abusing comment voting?
    – Reinstate Monica - Goodbye SE
    Aug 8, 2010 at 9:21
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    @Mark Robinson: It takes 5 people to close a question, but only 1 person to abuse the system. Accounts can get hacked too. I agree with you on the comment voting timer limit, though - it's hardly something that could be abused.
    – Andy E
    Aug 8, 2010 at 11:09
  • @Andy (I assume you mean "current voting timer limit") - that's a very good point about 5 people to close a question. But it only takes 1 to edit a question.
    – Reinstate Monica - Goodbye SE
    Aug 8, 2010 at 11:15
  • @MarkR: Which is visible though and can be rolled back by other high-rep users. Its not like high-rep users are blindly trusted.
    – Georg Fritzsche
    Aug 8, 2010 at 16:43
  • @Georg - yes, good point. And we don't have any way to roll back other peoples' votes (and probably don't want that). But back to the original timer issue - is that (the fact that there is no roll back on votes) really enough to warrant a timer for all users? Seems like the many are irritated because of the behaviour of the few.
    – Reinstate Monica - Goodbye SE
    Aug 8, 2010 at 17:30

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