Your account is on cooldown

[Decideforme]

Is it a new feature to limit posting? What are the rules?

Yes to the Archers, @RandomersAssociation! Also you get groups of posters listening along to (and posting comments about) interviews on Woman's Hour and also important (for women) employment tribunals.

We've currently got Sir Patrick Vallance giving evidence at the covid enquiry. Normally I would go to the thread and post my watch-along account of what he's saying and some of my thoughts. A group of posters (all recognisable regulars) have been doing this for weeks. So lots of posts, one after the other.

But now this could mean my account and ability to post on MN is 'cooled'?

So what's the point of bothering?

It is a sanction. You can't post. Your account is temporarily suspended and you have no idea for how long because it just says 'try again later'. I'm one of those posters who really likes to follow the rules and to be effectively told that you're in the naughty corner for doing what people have done on Mumsnet for years doesn't feel good.

Limiting to posters newly registered or with no posting history would probably be the way to go.

I understand why the "cool-down" is a good idea and why it'd be foolish of MNHQ to publish the details. I write software and recently had a genuine need to programmatically send millions of search API calls to a server - my initial attempts got blocked as a potential DDOS attack, entirely reasonably. It needed quite a bit of effort and significantly more runtime to make it work. That's as it should be.

Limiting to posters newly registered or with no posting history would probably be the way to go.

Yup. It would be a sensible rule.

This will effect pretty much every long running discussion subject, not just those in telly/radio.

If the new limit hits all posters equally, irrespective of posting history and site longevity then its far too blunt a tool and the usecases have not been fully elaborated. By their nature, its likely to be more experienced posters who do this to finish off one thread and direct to the new.

If anyone searches regarding this issue it has just happened to me.

I was being silly to get to the end of the Celeb Big Brother thread currently running.

12 posts to fill and a double eviction happening live in the next 10 minutes. Lets get to a new thread in time for that I thought.

I had posted 3 times in a minute and on the fourth time got this message in the posting box with a red warning triangle!

You've posted too much recently. Please try again later.

Then after a few attempts..

Your account is on cooldown for posting too much. Please try again later.

I was kicked out at 22.17 and tried to post every couple of minutes until I managed to post on the new thread, having missed all the eviction excitement of course, at 22.33

So maybe 10 or 15 minutes is the lockdown time.

Lesson learned.

Don't get excited on a Mumsnet thread 😎

same with the talk guidelines half of them are guessing vs detail list

Why not just start a new thread at around the 980 mark and link to it?

some like the novelty of the thread 1000 mark

Is there a link to the area where MN tells you about the sanctions they use and in what situations? Is it 3 strikes and you are out eg? Or is it all a mystery?

No, they don't give details to avoid trolls finding workarounds.

I can sympathise completely with not wanting to make it easy for trolls

But this policy was on my mind in the past 60 hours when I was posting a lot on the thread about Jasmin Paris, the Barkley marathons and her truly amazing achievements. Some of which was a series of shortish consecutive posts with no intervening posts.

To have been banned/suspended in the midst of a that - a live thread about an unfolding unprecedented event in women's running - like would have been truly awful.

And I had no idea if I was "at risk"

As someone else has said, it isn't a 'sanction' , its an anti-spamming device. If it requires you to post four times in a minute or so (as someone has implied), it isn't likely to happen to anyone who is posting genuine messages.

Posting multiple times to close up a thread seems a bit daft. Perhaps appealing to some, but no biggie to give up in the name of deterring spam.

@GoodOldEmmaNess

"Posting multiple times to close up a thread seems a bit daft. Perhaps appealing to some, but no biggie to give up in the name of deterring spam."

It has been the traditional way, for years, of making sure that ongoing threads continue seamlessly. You're right, it isn't a hardship to stop if it helps the site be a better place, but a polite notice from MNHQ saying "We know you've done this for years, but now it would be helpful if you didn't." would be far preferable to finding out by way of a 'cooldown notice' that effectively acts as a temporary ban.

I'm a completionist so wanted the thread full. Simple as that 😃

The same poster had started all our previous threads, and was active, and I wouldn't have stepped on toes by starting the next one.

I was being very silly I know but if I had known about the anti-spam effect I wouldn't have done it.

It was literally...

Post 1 = Hey guys

Post 2 = Time to start

Post 3 = another thread

etc, etc.

Once on cooldown I did a search, found this thread, and posted what had happened and stating how long I was locked down for in the interests of helping others with the information 😎

This happened to me a couple of weeks ago after a post posted 3 times.

Must bear this in mind next time I start a new Archers thread. We usually just leave the last few posts unfilled, but that can lead to someone making a point on the old thread that nobody else then sees, which is a shame.

Bumping this as this just happened to me for the first time ever and I was the OP!!

And, yes, it was a TV thread.

@MNHQ that's just silly.

Hi all...

We introduced this in late 2023 after a spate of spam attacks on the site. We have adjusted the threshold a few times since then - but not within the last 9 months.

We don't discuss what the thresholds are, or the timeout period, because that would allow spammers to circumvent the protections.

We don't apply this rule only to first time posters, or newly created accounts, because, again, we have had instances where spammers have used aged accounts registered for a period time before they start spamming.

With that being said, we could probably adjust it slightly to help with the closing of threads.

We certainly don't want you to stop using Mumsnet in the way you are used to! And it shouldn't be something that genuine posters need to worry about. If you see it during regular use, please let us know so that we can make further tweaks to the thresholds.

Thanks

Matt

I just did experience it in normal use! I was the OP of a watchalong thread. I posted three short messages in one minute at a highly dramatic point of The Masked Singer ( in our sad lives, anyway...), of about 6 I had posted in 5 minutes and was cooled down. I know sometimes spammers are OPs but those threads are usually pulled or die, so an OP of a Telly Addict thread seems to me to be free of suspicion!

@Piggywaspushed It's only ever happened to me once, and that was on a Telly Addicts thread too, I think.