We acknowledge duplicate posting is a problem in a lot of systems, including these forums. There are a few different reasons for duplicate posts.
A user doesn't realize someone has already asked a similar question
There are a few ways to address this and varying degrees we could go to help reduce the problem of different users asking the same questions. Some discussion systems I have worked on or seen have gone so far as to not even let the user contribute a new question until they have gone through some process of manually searching first. I think that is a little extreme though, and unless you do it right, users end up getting frustrated or not understanding why they are being asked to do that. Another option, one we are considering, is to bring back a feature we previously implemented to show similar topics based on the subject of the thread they are about to submit. So when a user is creating a new thread we show them similar topics and message to them, "Hey, here are some similar threads, take a look before you create a new one!". This functionality was originally in 3.x for a short time. The ux was bad, we didn't have a lot of space in the 'new thread' ux for the information to really make enough sense to the user. As we re think the ux for end users asking questions we think this "related existing questions" is a step towards helping with the duplicate problem. There are some challenges though. Surfacing the information without confusing users or ensuring it is not too much a barrier for contribution is a balance we need to find. Also, doing this in real time (I notice the above example the threads were created about at the same time) is a little more difficult unless you are querying the database to find the similar threads.
A user doesn't realize their new post/question was successful so they enter it again
The most common example of this is when a user is posting and some critical error happens OR their post takes so long to commit they give up or do not realize it was successful. They close their browser or if the application lets them, they click submit more than once. If these things are happening I consider them bugs and/or bad design. We simply shouldn't let users get into a situation like that. We should not let users submit or invoke any action that doesn't finish without some protection or ux that lets them know something is 'still working'. Users shouldn't have the ability to click submit over and over again. The application simply shouldn't "hang" either, and we are continually working on making our application more robust and resilient. Duplicate posts can also happen if a user can't find their newly created threads in their "My threads" area. The team is currently working on a fix for this.
Spam user simply posting the same content, sometimes in some automated fashion
I'm not going to spend too much time talking about spam in this system. The goal being to not distract end users with garbage and to reduce moderator time dealing with deleting it etc. I would be curious to know how much of a problem moderators think this is currently in this system.
Brent Serbus STO Forums Program Manager
