We noticed that without us knowing about it, many users (about 50) got silenced. Turns out that in some cases when a user types too fast their post gets send to the review queue, but in some cases it does not get send to the review queue.
If a post does not get send to the review queue we are not made aware that a user got silenced.
The fact that there are two different ways in which users who typed too fast are handled meant most of our moderators were under the false assumption that all cases of user typed too fast were always send to the review queue. That’s a reasonable assumption, the system is confusing by having two different ways of dealing with the same thing.
Users often feel discouraged when they get silenced and their post doesn’t go public, and don’t care to try and message a moderator.
When they get unsilenced, their post is still lost, which again is discouraging.
Not everyone who types crazy fast is a spam bot. It may as well be a user who used google translate to translate a long text he wrote to English before posting it.
Please consider changing this and sending all those posts to the review queue.
Then change your site settings to accomodate this, if you expect users to be pasting in a lot of text (this is really weird, btw, and a STRONG indication of a spammer), then change min_first_post_typing_time in your site settings.
No, that setting is still on default 3000ms.
Why should I change it? I can perfectly imagine that people use google translate paste it in the translator and press enter, therefore I do not see any reason to play around with this setting.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough with my question.
min_first_post_typing_time helptext eplains:
Minimum amount of time in milliseconds a user must type during first post, if threshold is not met post will automatically enter the needs approval queue.
I understand it like this: Each and every time the threshhold is not met, the post will enter the review queue, without exceptions.
What I have seen under “Staff Actions”: Every now and then a user is silenced by system for typing too fast, but there are no signs of this user in the review queue.
That’s my point. I’d like to understand why the majority of users who are typing too fast go to the review queue, while some of them do not go to the review queue.
My expectation is that independant of the min_first_post_typing_time value, be it 1 second or 60 seconds, if a posting does not meet the threshhold, it goes to the review queue, no exceptions. What I see in reality is different.
Fair, but you need to adjust this setting to a lower value to address the root of your problem: you have a lot of users that paste content into posts as a normal activity. Therefore, this setting must be set to a lower value on your instance, because your user audience has different traits than the audience on other average Discourse instances.
I do not understand why this should be the root cause of my problem, but have changed min_first_post_typing_time from 3000 → 1500 now.
My expectation is that this will change exactly nothing.
I agree. For your audience of pasting-all-the-time people, I think you should change it to something much lower like 100 milliseconds. I don’t think going from 3 seconds to 1.5 seconds is nearly enough.
The good news is that this limit only applies to new users so existing, established users won’t be affected.
why do you say it is weird for people to paste text? One forum on which I am active is dedicated to development of a phone app. Feedback for this app comes from around the world, often also from people who do not speak or write English. They use Google translate to try and give their feedback in English, and thus pasting happens. We suspect it happens weekly.
that solves the problem of their post getting rejected, but introduces the problem of increased spam as you already pointed out. So what I am requesting is a smarter way to handle these cases: send those posts to the review queue rather than silently rejecting them. That’s what the review queue was meant for in the first place, no?
You call pasting weird, I call silently rejecting posts weird.
I also have at least two cases where a new user that was silenced with: silenced_by_staff: New user typed too fast by the system user, and it never appeared in the review queue, and in the user’s profile overview there is no banner message showing hidden or deleted posts.
It’s quoted in the bug topic so the info is linked together. Currently I’m trying to find a consistent repro so we can track down where the issue may be. If you have any extra details that might help please share them in Automatic silencing for "typing too fast" doesn't notify administrator.
Currently I’m trying to find a consistent repro so we can track down where the issue may be. If you have any extra details that might help please share them in 