How to add a delay between function excutions

March 7, 2022

I am creating this little chatbox thing with socket.io, and I am wondering how I can add a delay between message sending to prevent spam and such.

Here is my code for sending a message.

    // Sends a chat message
    const sendMessage = () => {
        let message = $inputMessage.val();
        // Prevent markup from being injected into the message
        message = cleanInput(message);
        // if there is a non-empty message and a socket connection
        if (message && connected) {
            $inputMessage.val("");
            addChatMessage({ username, message });
            // tell server to execute 'new message' and send along one parameter
            socket.emit("new message", message);
        }
    };

>Solution :

You could add a variable that tracks the time of the most recently sent message and a comparison of this variable and the current time; if the difference is too small, refuse to send it.

Minimal example:

window.lastMessageTime = 0;
function sendMessage(message) {
  if(Date.now() - window.lastMessageTime < 5000)
    return false;
  window.lastMessageTime = Date.now();
  // Proceed
};