Forum Private Message 30 Second Restriction

I often have the case where I'm responding to more than one private message, and the second reply is really fast, so I can type it in less than 30 seconds.

And of course, it refuses to send it, leaving me sitting there waiting, refreshing the page every few seconds to check the countdown status.

This also happens if I'm sending a similar message to a small number of different players, where I get the message ready, and end up waiting a few minutes to be able to send them out.

In the worst case, I've actually left after hitting send or accidentally close the window, and people have ended up without a response to whatever they sent me. If I'm lucky in these cases I might find it a day or a week later, so the response is delayed. If I'm unlucky I have to type the response over again, and the message goes unanswered for much longer until one day in the distant future I'm going through all the messages and notice there's one that I never answered.

I get why this restriction is in place - it prevents a spam robot from sending off messages every second. However, it is getting in the way fairly regularly for me. So I was wondering if there's a way to tone it down. I'm sure others have also had it impact them, especially I imagine for staff who have to deal with a lot more queries than I do.

The most ideal solution I can think of would be to set the limit to something like 10 in 5 minutes, instead of 1 per 30 seconds if that's at all possible. So, a user could send up to 10 messages at once. After that, they have to wait 5 minutes. It's the same effect on a spam bot (Same overall rate they could send), but for a legitimate user who might send a small number of messages in bursts, it wouldn't interfere there.

I have no idea how it works in the backend. Adjusting it down to 10 or 15 seconds might also be a reasonable solution that would cut the annoyance by more than half for these cases, while still defending reasonably well against a spam bot. But the solution above would eliminate the problem entirely for me, with no lessening of security against a spam bot.

I agree. All I can say is thank goodness there's no timer on liking posts.

That sounds like the perfect idea for an April Fool's day prank though...

On the topic of this thread though, if this is possible then it sounds like a good idea to me. I don't know how many players besides yourself have had this issue, but as staff I often will have multiple forum pms running. I will often respond to each of them pretty quickly, and have to wait in between messages (I am a fast typer, so can easily write a short to medium length response in 30 seconds).

However, there is the chance this can not be changed currently on the forums, but that would be left to people who have more knowledge of this system than I do.

No it wouldn't be

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lol I feel this

Sure, it will defenetly help some people, I do also still remember it with auctions, that I was bidding on 5 running auctions at the same time and needed to wait for every message...

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I never had issues with PM's but I do notice some hindrance when posting 2 part guides. I posted the first part and then want the second part out as quickly as possible but... you have to wait.

Maybe they could set up some kind of whitelist for players who have already proven to be trustworthy with all this.