HN Explorer

New Feature: Delay

47 points by pg ↗ HN
There's a new field in your profile called delay. It's the time delay in minutes between when you create a comment and when it becomes visible to other people. I added this so that when there are rss feeds for comments, users can, if they want, have some time to edit them before they go out in the feed. Many users edit comments after posting them, so it would be bad if the first draft always got shipped.

Delay is initially 0. The maximum effective value is 10. It only applies to comments.

16 comments

[ 369 ms ] story [ 97.7 ms ] thread
aupajo
Nice! What else is in the works? :)
chengmi
Many users edit comments after posting them

Can we have an optional preview page before comments get posted instead? It would be useful for fixing typesetting and other errors before it's actually posted. I fear that having a delay of 10 minutes will drastically increase the number of redundant comments.

tlrobinson
I just set my delay to 1 minute. That should be more than enough to proofread and check typesetting of average length comments.
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Alex3917
As someone who often posts comments and then edits or deletes them after a minute or two, I like this feature. For some reason it's always easier to figure out if your sense of humor isn't actually funny or if you're being an asshole after you hit the submit button.
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dcurtis
Can you make the "delay" title in the settings link to this page, and noprocrast link to the page where you first described it?

This would probably help an extremely large number of people who will find an unexplained "delay" field confusing.

It's a good feature. I wish Twitter would implement something similar. I always find myself deleting tweets that I posted as a kneejerk reaction.

davidw
Neat, although ideally it would only delay the RSS feed comment, not the one visible on the web page, so as to keep things moving along quickly.
bootload
"... I added this so that when there are rss feeds for comments ..."

Nice my own personal garbage rss feed.

- does the rss option kick in for all users or karma > n?

- any idea of how many entries? (20?)

- will personal rss result in an extra hit on the servers?

prakash
PG: Did anyone specifically request this feature or did you work through a bunch of log data and noticed this behavior?
Xichekolas
I'd guess that he does the post/edit thing too, and is solving his own problem.

I do this with both comments and blog entries. Not sure why, but it's easier to assess what I say when I see it in final form.

prakash
I do it that way as well for posts + comments, I am guessing, like you, so does PG.

Still is that the only reason or was there a feature request by someone?

bob_dole
How about making the main rss feed auto-discoverable?
bprater
Could we have a definition of what this does on the profile page? (Along with the other fields.)
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