publish delay

From IndieWeb


publish delay (send delay in messaging systems) is a feature where new posts or messages are kept as drafts for a brief time before being published, allowing the user to cancel or edit them before they are published or sent.

Why

Publish delay is a useful way to implement "Undo publish" or "Undo send" in messaging systems.

Such "undo" features help provide a more forgiving UI, which tends to be friendlier.


IndieWeb Examples

Jamie Tanna

  Jamie Tanna has done this in the past by setting the `published` to a time in the future, which then does not get built by his site until after that date.

Tantek

Tantek Çelik uses a publish delay of 10 minutes for his Atom feed (since at least 2023-04-17), to provide time to fix typos and other minor errors before legacy feed readers poll and cache posts, some without a means to update or delete them.

Silo Examples

  • Gmail calls it "Undo Send", with adjustable timeouts of 5-30 seconds before an e-mail is actually sent out.
  • GMX's webmail interface has this feature.
  • Hacker News calls it "timeout", a freely chosen number of seconds before posts become actually visible to other users.

See Also