Execution Limits
Why limits exist
Remember from Events and Parameters Page: events fire constantly. A busy server can produce hundreds of messages a minute, and every single one of them wakes up your feature.
Without a limit, a feature that replies to messages would reply to all of them, as fast as they arrive. That's how people get rate-limited by Discord or spam a channel by accident.
Execution limits are your safety brake. They cap how often a feature is allowed to actually do something.
Nighty gives you two kinds:
Global limit
How often may this feature run in total?
Parameter limits
How often may it run for each individual parameter (person / server / channel / ...)?
You can use one, the other, or both together.
The global limit
The global limit is the simple one:
This feature may run X times per Y seconds.
It counts every run of the feature, no matter who triggered it or where.
The default is 1 time per 1 second, and you should usually leave it there or make it stricter. It costs you almost nothing in normal use, and it's the thing standing between you and a runaway feature that fires two hundred times in a minute.
We strongly recommend keeping the global limit at 1 per 1 second or higher. Only remove it if you have a specific reason and you're sure the feature is safe to run without a brake.
A few examples of what different settings mean:
1 time per 1 second
The default. At most one run each second.
1 time per 60 seconds
At most one run per minute, no matter how busy things get.
5 times per 60 seconds
Up to 5 runs a minute. A 6th trigger in that minute is ignored.
10 times per 3600 seconds
Up to 10 runs per hour.
How the window works: it's a rolling window, not a fixed clock. "5 times per 60 seconds" means "in the last 60 seconds, have I already run 5 times?" - it does not reset on the minute. As old runs age past 60 seconds they drop off and free up space again.
Limits based on parameters
This is the powerful one, and it's easier than it sounds.
A global limit treats everyone the same. If your feature just ran, it's on cooldown for everybody - the next person to trigger it gets ignored, even though it was somebody else who used up the run.
Often that's not what you want. What you usually want is:
"Once per person. Anna using it shouldn't stop Ben from using it."
That's exactly what a parameter limit does.
The idea
You pick a parameter from your event - user, guild, channel, member, role, and so on - and set a limit on it.
Nighty then keeps a separate counter for every individual one of those things.
Set a limit on user, and every single person gets their own private counter. Anna has hers, Ben has his. They don't affect each other at all.
🎟️ Think of it like a ticket booth. A global limit is one ticket for the whole room - once it's taken, nobody else gets in until it's back. A parameter limit hands everyone their own ticket. Using yours doesn't touch mine.
A worked example
Say you build a feature that replies with a welcome message when someone posts. You set:
Parameter limit on
user: 1 time per 60 seconds
Here's what happens:
12:00:00
Anna sends a message
✅ Feature runs - Anna's 60 seconds start
12:00:05
Anna sends another message
❌ Blocked - Anna is on cooldown
12:00:06
Ben sends a message
✅ Feature runs - Ben has his own counter
12:00:20
Ben sends another message
❌ Blocked - Ben is on cooldown
12:01:01
Anna sends a message
✅ Runs - Anna's 60 seconds are up
One feature, one limit, but each person is tracked separately.
Two things to know
Your own account is never limited. The me parameter can't be used for limits. There'd be no point - there's only one of you, so a limit on me would just be the global limit again.
If the parameter isn't in the event, the limit is skipped. Remember from Events and Parameters Page that a DM has no guild and no member. If you put a limit on guild and the feature is triggered by a DM, there's no server to count against, so that particular limit simply doesn't apply to that run. Your other limits (including the global one) still do.
"X times per Y seconds" vs "X times total"
Every limit has two settings: how many times, and per how many seconds.
But you can also switch the time part off. That changes the meaning completely:
3 times per 60 seconds
3 runs allowed in any 60-second window. Space frees up as time passes.
3 times, time off
3 runs allowed in total. Once used, that's it - it never frees up.
The second one is a hard budget rather than a cooldown. It's useful for one-shot things: "welcome each new member exactly once" (put it on member with the time off), or a feature you want to fire a fixed number of times and then stop.
When does a run actually get counted?
This one surprises people, and it's good news.
A trigger only counts against your limits if the feature actually did something.
Walk through what happens when an event arrives:
So a feature that reacts only to messages containing "hello" does not burn its cooldown on the hundreds of other messages it looked at and ignored. It only spends a run when it genuinely replies.
This means you can set a tight limit like "1 per 60 seconds" without worrying that background chatter will silently eat it.
When limits reset
Your limit counters are cleared in these situations:
Edit the feature
All of its limits reset to empty
Turn it off and on again
All of its limits reset
Rename it
All of its limits reset
Restart Nighty
All limits for all features reset
Counters are kept in memory while Nighty is running, not saved to disk. So if you set a "5 times total" budget and restart Nighty, you get a fresh 5.
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