Replying too quickly when flagging a post

I’ve just flagged my own post further up a topic just after typing a new reply as “Something else” to ask the moderator to split the topic. I took the time to suggest a new topic title. Discourse annoying threw away my flag saying I was replying too quickly. I had to wait a minute or two and then type it all in again. I don’t think that check should apply to reporting a post.

Were you trying to flag the post within the “editing grace period” in /admin/site_settings/category/posting?

I’m not sure of how it is actually coded, but from a design standpoint it makes sense to me that mails don’t go out, edits aren’t saved as revisions, and flags are disabled until that grace period has expired… otherwise it isn’t much of a grace period.

No problem with the concept of replying too quickly to actual posts but this is something different. It is most likely at the point of replying that you’ll say to yourself “this topic needs splitting”. It certainly should not throw away my hard-typed reason for flagging.

PS. Although one wonders how effective the two nags of replying too fast or not including enough text in a reply are. I suspect most just pause for a few minutes and still reply and we definitely get “…” at the end of short posts.

We don’t get all that many people padding their posts, but the number of “Body is too short (minimum is 20 characters)” I see in /admin/email/rejected is pretty high. Most of them are “Thanks Wally.”, “I agree.”, “Yes.” or “Amen.”. Our users don’t use “Thanks” much.

Sorry, I am unable to understand what you’ve written here? What are the steps to reproduce, exactly?

Pretty much what I said in my post…

  1. Typed a reply to a topic
  2. Realised it had wandered off-topic a few replies back
  3. Scrolled up to where it went off topic
  4. Flagged the post as “something else” and typed in why
  5. Clicked OK

Discourse message saying I was replying too quickly came up and threw my report away when I clicked OK. Had to wait a minute and do it again.

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This is because flagging a post as “something else” causes a private message to be sent to moderators with a link to the flagged message and the information you give, “something else”.

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I support having a custom error message for this specific case.

“Please wait a bit longer prior to flagging this post”

Or something along those lines

#pr-welcome

I still maintain this message should not appear at all.

I’d agree it’d be nice to not have the message thrown away, but I disagree that there should be no rate limit at all. Allowing infinite flagging (especially with group PMs involved) just opens us up to spamming.

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Can I work on this bug, such that the custom error message is shown?
@sam

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Sure, go for it !:smile:

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I’d still prefer the time check to be removed on the flagging mechanism. It makes no sense in this scenario IMO. Just had it again. Threads often wander in a discussion about beer which was obvious as I was just composing a reply to a topic. So the first thing I did was flag my own post as needing a topic split. To make me wait 30 seconds (or whatever) is plain annoying because I’m always going to still flag the post. It won’t make me reflect on whether I should be flagging it will it?

But if you don’t accept this, then yes please fix the bug where it throws away comment when using “Something else”. That’s definitely a bug. A user interface shouldn’t throw away a typed response without being able to correct it.