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melannen) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_suggestions2010-10-14 02:11 am
Scheduled Private Messages
Title:
Scheduled Private Messages
Area:
Inbox
Summary:
We're getting scheduled posts, that we can write in advance to automatically post at a later date. Can we get scheduled private messages, too?
Description:
I'm currently organizing a community project that involves people signing up to do certain things on certain days. It would be really cool if, right when they sign up, I could schedule a reminder message to be sent to them just before their date.
I think there are a lot of projects like this where pre-scheduled deadline reminders could make people's managing a lot easier. You could do all sorts of other neat things with this capability, too. Especially if you could send scheduled PMs to yourself.
The only downside I can see is if people abuse it to spam other users; but you can already ban people from PMing you, so I don't see that as being a big problem.
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
46 (69.7%)
Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
4 (6.1%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
1 (1.5%)
(I have no opinion)
15 (22.7%)
(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)
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Scheduled private messages to oneself sounds awesome. I'd be feeling less dubious about the potential for spamming if and only if there is the ability to filter the inbox to, say, all messages from one particular person, and thus mass-delete. There are some back-end settings that rate-limit how much traffic one user may send out; I recall sitting in on some testing, though I do not believe that the exact limits are published anywhere as it's justifiably obscure. I'd support also having a similar limit, that one may not have more than X number of messages on one's own timed to arrive to a user in a rolling time limit, to avoid evading that thing.
There was an incident on LJ where a fun and well-intentioned mild prank went very wrong: delivering 100 vgifts apiece to a whole bunch of people, spreading out the setup over a month or two so that it wasn't too arduous a task. (It was the special volunteer free vgifts, to other volunteers, so the ordinary rate limiting based on price, and rate limiting based on you may only use the free vgift 5 times, did not apply.) Some of the recipients were notably appalled and then had to clean up 100 emails and 100 inbox notifications.
I'm less worried about the possibility for a conspiracy of harassment, where a large group of people get together and each send a few timed to go off at a certain time, because from what I can tell, those sorts of things tend to be immediate. But for safety's sake, there ought to be some sort of administrative-end alert if one user has more than X number of messages queued for them, where X is a sufficiently startling number. It is a little creepy-sounding, but X should be an amount that would be abusive to receive, and might even strain DW's system, which is a totally legit concern to have.
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