How can I put a rate limit or cooldown on the number of points a user can gain?

I saw that there's already Daily point limit - Ask the Community - Verint Community 11.x - Verint | Telligent Community which was posted 7 months ago that's similar.

I've replied in that thread about how to set up the configuration and amount limit, but specifically if you wanted to throttle by a time frame, you would want a separate configuration value for that, and then you could filter the core_v2_pointTransaction.List call by start and end date for only summing up the points gained in that time frame.

Thanks for this answer. We can certainly work with this.

It'd be really nice if this was built into the points automation interface so that we could do this without writing any code. As it stands it's a fair amount of effort/coding to make this change across all the OOTB automations & the ones we've implemented.

A good candidate for the Ideas board

Yup!  Rate limit option for the number of points a user can gain  

For anyone wanting to do this in code.. here's a sample. Note that it doesn't page through the list of point transactions, so just bear that in mind for point operations that see a lot of transactions.

var userId = context_v2_automationTrigger.TriggeredBy.Id;
var contentId = context_v2_automationTrigger.Arguments.ContentId;
var contentTypeId = core_v2_user.ContentTypeId;

var pointsLimit = core_v2_widget.GetIntValue("pointsLimit", 50);
var pointsLimitTimespan = core_v2_widget.GetIntValue("pointsLimitTimespan", 1440);

var startDate = core_v2_utility.CurrentDate;
startDate.setMinutes(startDate.getMinutes() - pointsLimitTimespan);

// How many points awarded in timespan?
var totalPoints = 0;
var pointTransactions = core_v2_pointTransaction.List({ ContentId: contentId, ContentTypeId: contentTypeId, UserId: userId, StartDate: startDate });
pointTransactions.forEach(function(pointTransaction) {
    totalPoints += pointTransaction.Value;
})

if (totalPoints < pointsLimit) {
    context_v1_pointsAutomation.AwardPoints(userId, contentId, contentTypeId);
}