15
votes
Would it be useful to allow time-delayed posts?
I have some music links I was thinking of posting. However, I didn't want to flood ~music with 10 new links at once. It can make a category look like it has really homogenous content to newcomers when a single poster has posted a bunch of links at once. What I'd like to do is post one per day for the next several days. But I don't want to potentially forget one day because I got a little busy, or whatever. Would it be useful to be able to create a topic but set it to not post until a particular day or time?
I've encountered the same problem you have where I don't want to inundate the site with similar topics and so I just put the title, URL, and group in a Notepad++ document and submitted them over some arbitrary course of time.
Incredibly unlikely scenario
Not that I think we're at risk of it here, but allowing scheduled posts by users does open up the possibilities of spam and gaming the system (as people/bots do on reddit) to post at certain times when the site is most active in order to get the most attention.
Again, I don't think it'd be an issue here with our current size and type of users, but still a possibility. It's also one more thing for Deimos to create and maintain.
I've been doing something similar, but it's not ideal.
As far as spamming goes, I'd be fine with only being able to set the day it gets posted, and the time is chosen randomly. Or set a desired time and it's randomly posted within +/- 3 hours of that time, or something like that.
I think it’s nice to have a “post of the day.” Maybe think of a unique tag to link the series together? Doing it manually is fine and don’t worry about missing a day; you’re not a bot so you don’t need to act like a bot.
Alternatively, you could create a topic and post a new top-level comment each day.
I think this could be useful. I've also run into the "don't want to submit a big pile of links all at once". Even if they're in different groups, it makes the front page on default sort settings look weird, because it temporarily has a big pile of 0-vote / 0-comment topics right at the top.
Idea for how to implement this that wouldn't be overly complicated would be to have a drop-down when submitting a topic that is "time until it's visible to other users", defaulting to 0. You could make it 5 minutes if all you want to do is proofread the post before it's "live" (less of a concern because Tildes has built-in preview, but I would kill for this feature on reddit). Or, you could make it several hours or days in the "want to post a link a day to ~music rather than flood it all at once" use case.