I've been getting "You're posting too fast. Please slow down." messages a lot lately. Even if I try to post an article within an hour of posting a comment. Did something change? I used to be able to post about 3 times every 10min.
I took a several month break from HN and decided to have a go at participating again.
I now remember one of the main reasons I stopped posting: It seems that if I comment on more than a handful of articles, I am hit with a rate limiting message saying I am posting too fast. I guess I can see the reasoning behind that, but even after waiting several hours I still get the message.
Is this unique to my account or did the rules change earlier this year? It's nearly impossible to participate in productive discussion if you are limited to 5 messages per day.
This is what seems to cause “You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.” to appear for up to two hours. Fittingly, I had to wait two hours to post this comment.
"You're posting too fast" is a limit that's manually applied to accounts that have a history of "posting too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or getting into flame wars". You can email dang (hn@ycombinator.com) if you think it was applied in error, but if it's been applied to you more than once... you probably have a continuing problem with proliferating flame wars or posting otherwise combative comments.
I seem to recall hitting the limit after posting something like two replies on one story and being confronted with “you’re posting too fast” when trying to post an unrelated comment on another story.
I think the limiter kicks in as soon as one of one’s comments get any downvotes at all (i.e. even when also being mostly upvoted), but I’m obviously not sure about this.
This is obviously very annoying, and I can’t see how it helps discussions.
While sometimes it does look like some kind of throttling on your activity, I wonder if it can also be some kind of general throttling (site-wide)
Though the usability of that message could be improved, as for example, you could be given more info, maybe some timing on when you'd be able to post again, or at least something to let you know before posting
It said I was posting too quickly (regardless of where I tried to post) and I hadn't posted anything in over 45 minutes. Maybe it goes up exponentially or something and I've just never run afoul of it before.
The board is not made in PHP. It's made in Arc that is a LISP like language.
"posting too fast message" probably means that the system thinks that you are posting too much. The mods added a los of small tweaks to prevent flamewars and spam. (Sometimes these tweaks block innocent comments by mistake.) The message doesn't mean that the system is too busy.
Anyway, for an official reply you can contact the mods by email hn@ycombinator.com
There is a penalty box for accounts that are determined unsavory, like mine, where they have a finely-controlled quota of commentary beyond which they are "submitting too fast" and told to slow down. Everyone has this limit, it's just for some accounts it has been set significantly lower. I suspect with that system you'll see this more, rather than less.
Yeah, I think I get something like 5 posts in several hours (or maybe it's 5 posts in an hour with several hours of cooldown time?). I suspect it's because I have too many "controversial" posts, which is to say that center-left is a bit too far to the right for some on HN.
Edit: I couldn't even post this because I've been supposedly "posting too fast" when I've only had ~5 comments in the last day. Are you causing/influencing/related to this in some way? I had never seen this happen before but ever since our last conversation I have seen it happen twice, both when you have been around the thread.
You’re likely making too many comments/edits too close to each other, which could be misconstrued for spam. Nothing to it, just wait a bit between posts.
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