Invite Request Cooldown

[Xanadeas]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

At the moment there is no cooldown on invite requests making it very easy to spam someone and flood their notifications with requests.

Describe the solution you'd like

A simple cooldown timer could be added. Something like 10-20 seconds between requests would prevent spam.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Currently people are rate limited when they send too many messages, thus preventing them from sending more. But this occurs only after sending a large number of messages/requests.

Additional Context

No response

Requesters

Xanadeas

[shiftyscales]

Something like 10-20 seconds between requests would prevent spam.

This alone would be insufficient as there are use-cases for sending invites more frequently than this- specifically if inviting a user to a number of different sessions, e.g. a headless that has an autoinvite list.

Likewise- the way the UI currently functions- the invite button becomes the 'revoke invite' button- so all prior invites are invalidated if this button is spammed.

I think the needs of this issue would be better covered by the notification system rework #1918.

In specific, the system could be set up such that subsequent notifications are suppressed/batched into the initial notification of the same type.

E.g. if a user sends you six messages in a row- you might not need a ping for each of those messages- but rather just the first one letting you know the user has messaged you and to check your messages.

[Frooxius]

There actually is cooldown right now, it's just relatively high.

I'm not sure if this is something that really needs a technical solution on technical level. E.g. some users do like to send a few invites to get someone's attention, I don't think we want to necessarily prevent that, since it can have its uses.

Technically invites are not really different from other messages to - which could be used to spam too - but you can also legitimately send multiple messages within a 10 second interval.

If you don't like people spamming you with it there's few things that could be done: 1) Try telling them to stop - this is simple, but can be effective. Sometimes people don't realize it's annoying someone, so communicating that can help 2) We could possibly add settings to mute invite/messages from particular person if they keep pestering you with it

[Xanadeas]

This is true, sending multiple messages or invites can grab someone's attention. But sending them en masse would be generally rude in my opinion. Thankfully I haven't run into it myself but I'm sure others have. on VRC I have multiple friends who get invite spammed sometimes in the hundreds and without a cooldown there's no real way to prevent it. I just think it'd be wise to address it before it could become a problem.

However it sounds like there's already a system in place to prevent mass spam. I just haven't encountered it personally as I don't usually spam invites or messages.

[shiftyscales]

We could possibly add settings to mute invite/messages from particular person if they keep pestering you with it

Being able to selectively turn off different kinds of notifications on a per-user basis would be useful. Here is an example of what this looks like in Steam:

However I had figured that level of granularity would probably be better offered following the contacts UI rework #1116?

[Frooxius]

This sounds like an issue you haven't really encountered then?

We do have rate limiting systems in place to prevent abuse of the system. It's possible it's not tuned for specific scenarios, but we'd need to know that it's actually a real issue if we were to invest time into investigating this.

[Xanadeas]

Mass spammed no. Smaller amounts of spam yes. Having a selective notification system would be nice. But if this is something that'd go better with the UI rework I understand. I also understand if it's not a massive issue not pouring resources into it. It was just something I was worried about as I've seen it happen elsewhere and I tend to err on the side of caution.