Introduce command to control slowmode

[kwzrd]

Context
High profile channels such as #python-general have slowmode enabled to make chat traffic manageable. The amount of delay is adjusted based on current traffic in the channel.

Problem
The Discord GUI only allows @Admins to choose from a limited amount of options.

The API, however, allows much more granular control, taking ints in the range [0, 21600]. As such, we often use int eval to set custom values, commonly 2 seconds during low traffic times.

Proposal
The proposal is to introduce a bot command which will take a channel and a delay, and forward them to the API.

The advantages include:

• Convenience: we no longer need to int eval custom values
• The command can be made available to mods, which otherwise do not have access to the channel control panel

The implementation should be fairly trivial. Command signature takes a text channel (a d.py convertor makes this convenient), and an int delay. The delay is checked to ensure it fits into the correct range, with an informative message returned otherwise. If the delay is valid, it is passed to the TextChannel.edit method (linked above).

[Den4200]

I think this would be a very useful command for the mods. I'd be willing to take this issue since it's quite simple 😃

[kwzrd]

Excellent, it's all yours. 👍

[jb3]

This may be out of scope but could we integrate with the scheduler to allow slow modes that last a certain amount of time?

For example: !slowmode #python-general 6h 5s

[jb3]

Also, we can probably use the duration converter to set the slowmode instead of an int argument.

[Den4200]

@J03B

This may be out of scope but could we integrate with the scheduler to allow slow modes that last a certain amount of time?

I don't particularly mind implementing this, but it will quickly become fairly complex.

Using your example, !slowmode #python-general 6h 5s, what would the slowmode delay be after the 6 hours are up? Would the user need to specify another delay, which kicks in after the duration? Or would it reset to some default delay set for the specific channel?

This would also need to be persistent across restarts, so the slowmode delay will become the second delay/default delay after the specified duration. We'd have to use some form of persistent storage for this, which would probably be Redis.

Also, we can probably use the duration converter to set the slowmode instead of an int argument.

I'd have to create a new converter since the duration converter returns a future date, instead of a timedelta. I think this would be a good idea though and should be pretty trivial to implement.

[jb3]

Sounds good to me.

I agree it will become complex so we can drop the persistence/scheduler design.

I don't think a new converter will be necessary. Just taking the current one and then seconds = (future_date - datetime.now()).total_seconds() should suffice.