!hush command

[lemonsaurus]

Occasionally, two users will be too busy fighting each other to notice a moderator trying to step in and clean up the situation. In these cases, we want to be able to silence the channel for a few minutes while we sort out what's going on and what we're going to do about it.

Enter: !hush. This command will remove the ability for anyone except staff to post messages in that channel for a short duration, 10 minutes by default.

This will not need any work on the site, so it should be quite approachable.

Since this is a moderator command, you should write unit tests for it.

Implementation details:

• !hush should remove posting permissions for non-staff in the channel it is called in for 10 minutes.
• Add the alias !silence
• !hush <duration> should set a custom duration. This duration can either be specified as 5M, 5m or just 5. It should not be possible to exceed 15 minutes in duration.
• A special alias !shh should be added. This alias should be handled by the CommandNotFound handler (the way we do tags aliasing today). That's because we want to be able to support a dynamic amount of h's behind the sh. For each h, increase the duration by 2 minutes. For example, !shh would cause a 4 minute hush, !shhh would cause a 6 minute hush, !shhhh would cause an 8 minute hush, and so on. The duration should never exceeed 15 minutes, no matter how many h's you add. The minimum number of h's should be 2.
• A second command, !unhush, should undo the hush immediately. This is important in case the bot restarts in the middle of the duration, since we're not persisting the duration anywhere.
• The unhush should also have an !unsilence alias, and an !unshhh with any number of h's.
• Both commands should have unit tests.

[fiskenslakt]

While I love the idea of the dynamic amount of h's idea, I really don't see the point in having a duration for this. Are we assuming that the invoker will forget to unmute the channel? This should absolutely just be a toggle in my opinion. Mute and unmute, that is all.

My rationale for this is two-fold:

1. Duration often causes command misfires due to typing it incorrectly. And given this command is often one that would need to be invoked quickly, pausing to think about a duration is just a waste of time, even if the time wasted is fairly small. Having a duration also makes the command more complicated, and will likely cause some staff to forget how it works, and thus waste time checking the command's help page to see the syntax.
2. There are situations in which a longer duration would be wanted. For example, whenever a regular user manages to slip through the cracks and mention a role that pings a ton of users, and causes absolute chaos in that channel for a seemingly endless amount of time. Ergo, it would be better to just not worry about the duration at the time of invocation, and just feel out when a staff member should unmute the channel again.

If we really feel there is a chance that staff will forget to unmute a channel, I'd prefer to have the bot ping us in #mod-alerts every 15min or so reminding us which channels are currently muted. It would also be nice to have some sort of status command telling us which channels are currently muted, despite it likely not getting much use.

Just my 2¢

[ikuyarihS]

I think defaulting to 15m if not passing in duration is a fine idea as well, but having duration will let mods be more flexible in more cases.

I would certainly don't want to see a channel being locked up longer than necessary when there are a lot of people asking.

An example would be like this - After I muted the channel for 5m as a clear sign that the conversation is to be dropped off, if I still see wrong behaviors then I'll issue mute directly and for much longer duration. In that case, locking the channel for extra 10m may do us more harm than good, and since it's not hard to implement, I think we can go for it.

Also I second the idea of pinging periodically when somehow the channel is still locked.

Question about designing

Should we mute all non-mods or should we mute based on a list of roles? The former is too strict while the latter requires maintenance for the roles can change.
Or, should we mute all role that does not have admin?

[lemonsaurus]

@fiskenslakt

Duration often causes command misfires due to typing it incorrectly.
...
Having a duration also makes the command more complicated, and will likely cause some staff to forget how it works

The duration is optional and I think the default of 10 minutes is reasonable enough that it would be very rare to need to specify a duration at all. And when you do need to, the syntax is so simple (!hush 5 for 5 minutes) that I'm not sure I buy that people would forget it if they had ever used it before. And frankly, I'll never not use !shhhhh, it's the greatest alias idea of all time.

There are situations in which a longer duration would be wanted. For example, whenever a regular user manages to slip through the cracks and mention a role that pings a ton of users, and causes absolute chaos in that channel for a seemingly endless amount of time.

I do buy this. It might be useful to be able to toggle this on without a duration. I'm not sold on this exclusively being a toggle, but I'd be open to having the option to just toggle it on.

Maybe something like !permahush or !hush forever would be a way to achieve this. Would love to hear thoughts on this from others.

I'd prefer to have the bot ping us in #mod-alerts every 15min or so reminding us which channels are currently muted.

This sounds good. If a channel is muted more than 15 minutes, it can ping every 15 minutes. That is, if we allow channel mutes to exceed 15 with a permahush type feature.

@ikuyarihS

Should we mute all non-mods or should we mute based on a list of roles? The former is too strict while the latter requires maintenance for the roles can change. Or, should we mute all role that does not have admin?

All non-staff. Anything below Helper.

[scragly]

I think the default of 10 minutes is reasonable enough that it would be very rare to need to specify a duration at all

Agree

!hush forever

I like this option, as it sticks to the idea of having a duration as the argument still, so it doesn't introduce just another thing to remember (unlike !permahush)

ping us in #mod-alerts every 15min or so reminding us

Agree

[Numerlor]

Can start working on this, but may take longer as I'll be fresh to tests in general

[SebastiaanZ]

That's okay, there's no rush. Keep in mind that the pending PR to upgrade our bot to Python 3.8 (#783) will bring some changes to our test suite.

[Numerlor]

Does pinging mods and setting up the 15 minute alerts sound good when the bot restarts with active hushed channels?
Couple other things:
Is it worth parsing message contents for a channel args with !shh/!unshh?
Should the remaining duration be kept for a list of hushed channels?

[lemonsaurus]

@Numerlor

How are you planning to detect that there are active hushed channels on restart? It does sound like a good solution to just setup the mod ping cycle, though, yes.

I don't think we need to take channel as an arg for any of these commands. This command should only be invoked in the channel we are currently in.

I'm not sure what you're asking about regarding keeping remaining durations. are you suggesting some sort of storage for these things? I was hoping to keep this command as simple as we can, without need for persistant data.