We added a new slow mode for topics that are heating up. Staff can enable slow mode from the topic admin wrench. When enabled, users will have to wait for a staff configured period of time before being able to post again.
The question is:
Is it possible to do the same but for a category? May be it’s possible to add such setting to the category settings to automatically activate it for all new topics in the category?
I found it useful to make discussions very thoughtful, but it’s not convenient to do it manually with every topic in the category, because sometimes authors forget to activate it.
I checked all options. Of course, they are working for topic separately. But I need to have a per-category setting. This way all topics will have this setting activated automatically.
Possibly – we’re still gathering feedback on the feature, I consider it beta. Extending it to entire categories might be premature at this point in time?
I personally would prefer that we first identify criteria that cause topics to enter (and exit) “slow mode” automatically.
Our reason is that we have an internal rule of sending reports once a day and use this category for this purpose.
Also there was a conversation about political discussions. This feature would help to create fully another approach to conversations. If activated, they would become very thoughtful and posts would transfer to essays (not short sentences).
This way it may be useful for educational purposes also.
Great feature! I’m curious is the timer per user or per topic?
IE, can each user only post once in the topic (say) every 15 minutes, or the topic can only receive a post every 15 minutes (as if it were a repeating topic lock on a timer that resets after each post)?
This would be correct. It works on a user basis so each user can post a reply every 15 minutes. Then after 15 mins is up they can post again but they must wait another 15 before they can post.
I too would request the ability to do this at a category level, not just a topic level.
We have a category for Politics and it demands over 90% of my time as moderator. I’d love to throttle back the discussions there by putting the entire category on ‘slow mode’.
@codinghorror (and other developers) – how is the feedback so far? Would y’all accept a PR to allow this per-category “slow mode”? (along the same lines as per-category auto-closing, per-category moderator approval, per-category default “wiki” posts) Or is there still more research needed?
