Delay

The Plucky delay is the most important Plucky setting.

An explanation of what the delay is and why it matters

Plucky users sometimes question why they can’t lock their configuration settings with a password.

Actually, they can with a locked configuration, but this is besides the point.

While the desire for a password-locked configuration or a restricted device sometimes makes sense, oftentimes the desire for such comes from a misunderstanding of what the delay is and how it’s supposed to be used.

Plucky is self-control software and this means, unlike other-control software, the user decides his own boundaries and creates rules with the software to support that. He decides his own allowed and blocked content; no one else decides for him.

This obviously requires a level of access to the configuration in order to continually tweak the configuration over time–something that isn’t supported by a password locking the user out.

In order to balance the need for user control without ceding too much control and making security paper thin, the idea of a gatekeeper is needed. A gatekeeper evaluates the impact of rules: block rules cause the user to lose access so there is no harm in accepting these rules to the configuration; allow rules give the user more freedom which is risky for someone trying to practice self-control so such rules should be held back from entering the configuration immediately.

The delay fulfills the role of the gatekeeper so that users can’t impulsively add rules that would be detrimental to the healthy internet habits they are trying to form. Like everything related to Plucky, use the delay carefully and set your boundaries thoughtfully!

Common misconceptions of how the delay works

WRONG - setting the delay to 0 when you want to make changes to your configuration

RIGHT - making changes to your configuration without changing the delay

Plucky will only reflect the changes once the amount of time represented by the delay elapses.

WRONG - “blocked sites are only blocked for 1 week because I have a 1 week delay”

RIGHT - blocked sites are blocked forever unless you remove/replace the block rule

The 1 week delay in this case means it will take 1 week from the time you delete the block rule until Plucky actually updates the configuration to reflect the change.

Basics

When the delay is 0 (nil), any change to Plucky configuration will have immediate effect.

For example, all the following commands will have immediate effect.

pluck + allow a.com
pluck + allow everything
pluck uninstall

However, when the delay is not 0 (nil), any changes to Plucky configuration that will result in greater access will be delayed.

For example, after the following sequence access to b.com will still not be granted until 30 seconds have elapsed.

pluck + delay 30
pluck + allow b.com

Any decreases to the delay must also survive the delay period. So, given a delay of 30 seconds, after requesting the delay be set to 0, 30 seconds must elapse.

$ pluck + delay 0
$ pluck delay
30
$ sleep 30
$ pluck delay
0

In addition, uninstalling is only permitted when the delay is 0. So the following will not result in Plucky being uninstalled.

pluck + delay 1
pluck uninstall

But the next sequence will.

pluck + delay 0
sleep 30
pluck uninstall

Not a timer

The delay is not a timer. Sometimes new users think the delay is a timer that once set counts down to 0, and then must be reset. While the Plucky delay could be used that way, doing so is nearly always a misunderstanding of how it is intended to be used.

For example, consider Peter. On Monday morning, Peter installs Plucky and immediately sets his delay to one hour by typing pluck + delay 1h. After typing that command he does not change the delay. At 2pm on Monday, he realizes he needs access to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa and it is blocked by his current configuration. So, Peter, without changing his delay at all simply clicks the Plucky button to allow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa . This change will not take effect until 3pm, one hour later. At 3pm, the configuration change becomes effective and Peter can now access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa . He did this without changing his delay from one hour. His delay was one hour, and it still is, and Peter, in fact, keeps his delay at one hour for the remainder of his happy life.

Advice

Use a 10 second delay your first day using Plucky until you understand how it works and are able to gauge what value would work best for you. After that, adjust the timer up and down as necessary, depending on your level of self-control. See also tips for more advice.

Setting the delay

You can set the delay in a console window or using the interface in the browser.

TODO: screencast of setting the delay.

Skipping the delay by using expedite approvals

The delay for any change can be skipped by using expedite.

Varying the delay by time of day

Plucky allows you to vary the delay by time of day.

pluck when 0-8 delay 3600
pluck when 8-12 delay 30
pluck when 12-24 delay 7200

See hrs3 for more on the time format used.

Delay patterns (advanced)

Delay patterns are somewhat complex, hard to describe, and to use them well may require some significant thought. If those hurdles don’t stop you, read on.

It is possible to use different delays for different changes to Plucky configuration through a feature known as “delay patterns”. For example, to specify that the allowing a new youtube video should require a 45 minute delay, the delay pattern + allow https://www.youtube.com/ could be used like so:

pluck delay 45m "+ allow https://www.youtube.com/"

Thus would any rules that allow urls starting with https://www.youtube.com/ be delayed by 45 minutes.

Similarly, to use a delay of 10 hours before removing any rule that blocks:

pluck delay 10h "- block"

To use a delay of 24 hours before a new allow everything rule would take effect:

pluck delay 24h "+ allow everything"

In the 3 examples above, everything between the double quotes is called the delay pattern.

Special syntax can be used to force certain kinds of matching of delay patterns.

Delay pattern that uses the general delay

To use a delay pattern that should use the general delay, whatever its value, use _ instead of an ordinary delay time. E.g.:

pluck delay _ "+ allow https://www.youtube.com/"

While it may seem redundant to specify the general delay, there are cases when this is handy.

Delay pattern details

TL;DR: In Plucky 1.13 or newer, leave out the anchor characters (^, $, or ~) for best results, unless you are changing the delay of a feature.

As of Plucky 1.13, delay patterns match naturally by default. Older versions of Plucky use loose matching by default.

A delay pattern may match naturally, loosely (a substring match), exactly (an exact match), or prefixedly (a prefix match). Although the ^$ syntax for delay patterns is borrowed from regular expressions, delay patterns are not regular expressions.

A delay pattern starts with an operation character that is + (add) or - (del) to indicate whether the pattern applies to adding rules or to removing existing rules.

After the operation character (+ or -) is a space.

After the space is an optional anchor character, which may be either ~ or ^. If neither are specified the pattern matches naturally, with a few special exceptions.

A pattern may end in a $ character to indicate the end of the pattern.

To restate, the special markers in delay patterns are:

~

match loosely (e.g. + ~youtu matches + allow www.youtube.com)

^

match only if the start of a rule strictly matches the characters that follow (see examples below).

^$

match only if the rule matches exactly, from beginning to end (see examples below).

$

match only if the rule ends with a match for the pattern.

When there is no special marker, the delay pattern matches naturally, which means that the delay pattern is first converted to the internal Plucky language syntax, and then matching is performed over each term in the result, which is what somebody who didn’t read any of this documentation would probably expect.

For example:

pluck delay 1h
pluck delay 45m "+ allow https://www.youtube.com/"                 ## delay new youtube videos by 45 minutes
pluck + allow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dNGacak8Dc          ## delayed 45 minutes
pluck + allow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dNGacak8Dc user:jon ## also delayed 45 minutes
pluck + allow youtube.com                                          ## delayed 1 hour

Be aware that host-specific rules do not at present affect urls, so most of the time, you want to use a url in delay patterns rather than a simple host name.

pluck delay 45m "+ allow a.com"                                    ## probably bad
pluck delay 45m "+ allow https://a.com/"                           ## probably good

Because adding new allow rules, removing any block rules, and allowing everything are three operations that users often want to create a special delay pattern for, the following are handled as special cases to do these three things respectively.

pluck delay 30m "+ allow"            ## delay any new allowances by 30 minutes
pluck delay 10m "+ allow otherwise"  ## delay the allow otherwise rule by 40 minutes
pluck delay 10h "- block"            ## delay removal of any blocks by 10 hours
pluck delay 24h "+ allow everything" ## delay allowing of "everything" by 24 hours

Specifying a delay for changing any delay

Plucky automatically allows increases to the delay immediately while decreases will be delayed. However, those who use delay patterns sometimes want to specify a specific delay for changing delays other than the to-be-replaced delay (wow, that’s wordy!). That can be accomplished using a delay pattern that contains the word “delay”, as shown below.

pluck delay 5m                       ## usual delay is 5 minutes
pluck delay 30m delay                ## changes to delay take 30 minutes

Specifying delays for specific features

To alter how long it takes to add or remove a feature, use ^feature: as in the example below, or else the pattern will not have the desired effect because the specificity of an unanchored pattern will be too low to beat some internal Plucky rules that govern whether adding or removing any given feature should be delayed.

pluck delay 24h "- nhb"            ## fails, match specificity is too low
pluck delay 24h "- ^feature:nhb"   ## works, require 24 hours to remove nhb feature

Specifying delays for unadmin

SImilarly to features, a ^ or $ is necessary to make a delay pattern for unadmin effective.

pluck delay 24h "- ^unadmin:peter"

Importing configurations

On https://u.pluckeye.net/, devices have delays as well as configurations. A delay on a device governs only the delay for changing the configuration assigned to that device; it does not govern changes to the configuration itself.