Floodgate Bot

[js-choi]

Heya hey, everyone. I’m a member of the TC39 pipe champion group, and I’m also a volunteer moderator here. I wanted to make an announcement. (It shouldn’t actually affect things much.)

We’ve installed a “floodgate” moderation bot on this repository. When a issue gets a huge flood of new comments (i.e., new comments are being created at a very high rate), then the bot will temporarily lock that issue. (The threshold rate is currently set to twelve comments in the same issue in the same sixty-minute period.)

This doesn’t mean that the automatically locked high-traffic threads will get locked permanently. It just means that the issue’s thread will cool down until a volunteer moderator is able to look at what’s going on.

Why are we trying this out?
We’ve had two cases so far in which a “centithread” (a thread with hundreds of messages) suddenly occurred over the course of hours, without any warning. These two cases were very difficult for almost everyone (myself included) to keep up with, and much of their content didn’t meet the minimum standards of the TC39 Code of Conduct.

The members of the champion team are all just unpaid volunteers, with our own families and our own separate day jobs. We do our best to read every message and piece of feedback that comes through—but when a hundred (often lengthy) messages suddenly occur in a single day, then it’s simply not possible for us to keep up.

Now, if a centithread suddenly occurs again, then the bot will automatically force a cooldown until a volunteer moderator can come look at stuff and ensure everything is okay, possibly with a warning or some message hiding.

This temporary cooldown would hopefully keep tempers and conduct from spiraling out of control. If the next available volunteer moderator finds that the thread is actually doing fine and okay, then they can unlock it. And, in the meantime, participants and onlookers can take a break from the high-traffic issue.

Of course, there’s a risk of the bot unintentionally locking a thread in which people are merely having a rapid (but good-faith) conversation. If this happens, we might adjust the bot’s trigger threshold. But having a temporary cooldown in this case—after a whole hour of one new message every five minutes on average—wouldn’t be such a bad thing, anyway.

We’re open to feedback about this.

TL;DR: Basically, we just want to avoid another centithread spawning overnight or over the weekend. If more than twelve new comments occur in the same thread within the same hour, then a bot will lock the thread, but that lock isn’t necessarily permanent; it’s intended to be just a cooldown. Hopefully this all makes sense. :)