# cooldown: forcing a wait before letting users exchange messages

how do you keep a discourse civil?

one approach is moderation or peer review where another person looks at your message before sending. they could flag any uncivil behavior that you would need to fix before publishing. i think this can be pretty good but doesn't really work for private, one on one conversations where there is no third party at all. and the third party is not always predictably responsive. e.g. what if the moderator or reviewer is on a vacation?

here's another idea: cooldown. you can split sending a message into three steps: draft the message, wait for a while (configurable but e.g. 1h), publish the draft.

there would be no auto-publish: the publish would be a conscious action. and an edit would reset the cooldown so you need to make the weird decision whether to publish an imperfect message or wait even longer.

so the idea is that you don't send your initial draft, you yourself review your own message, hopefully in a different, cooler mood in which you won't send a rude message. if the message isn't worth waiting 1h for, then it's maybe better if you don't send it at all.

you can adhere to such rules yourself but maybe a discussion forum plagued with flamewars could enact this on its members indiscriminately. it could cool its members down a bit without fully stopping the discussion. it would definitely drive some people away but that's good: large discussion forums are hard to maintain and bringing down its population count is probably good. hopefully the people who remain are the ones who are really motivated to publish their thoughts, not just gut reactions. and as the community cools, the admins can lower the cooldown duration.

i do expect that some members would use browser extensions to auto-publish messages and defeat the whole purpose of this restriction. but there's still the possibility of a user reconsidering a message even if it's auto-published. so there is some potential benefit even in this case. and i'd also expect that only a minority of people would bother installing such extensions so the overall effect would be still strong.

this relates a bit to my previous @/batch post where i recommended waiting until morning to send messages. that is pretty much infeasible for most things but with the cooldown idea one can get to it halfway. prepare all the drafts one by one and then pretty much send them at once even during the day.

not sure if this is a good idea but if i ever were to build a discussion forum (or even something like an anonymous comment section on a blog like this), i'd definitely try this 3 step method as an attempt to increase the quality of the messages.

i'd implement an anonymous comment section like this:

• you have an edit box where the user can prepare their message.
• once they complete their draft, they hit the "save draft" button.
• this sends their comment's hash to the server.
• the server appends a timestamp to that hash and hashes that using a secret salt.
• the server sends back the timestamp and the new hash to the user's browser.
• the comment form will tell the user to come back in 5 minutes and if they still want to publish, they can do so then.
• after 5 minutes they click publish and the form sends the previous timestamp and new hash along the contents.
• the server verifies the hash using the secret salt and if it checks out, the comment appears.
• for extra protection: increase the cooldown duration with each new message by one minute. e.g. after 10 messages the users would need to wait 15 minutes to publish a message. this would prevent the comment section from suddenly blowing up and encourage moving long discussions to some other place.

sounds complicated but i think it should be pretty easy to implement without keeping any extra state on the server. it doesn't really protect against a dedicated spammer but might work fine in the wild until the blog becomes a target.

published on 2021-06-16

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