For one class of duplicate posts, the 'hitting submit twice' post, a hash / MAC based system, as suggested by mowgli might indeed work, and a text analysis of some kind might even catch slightly deviating double posts, but it will be up to the pmdevils to judge the validity of this approach, especially when one takes the extra DB and CPU load into account.

There is a second class of duplicates though, as evidenced by this, it's cousin, his brother and their father, conveniently posted by anonymonk, so an analysis based on author to find duplicates is out of the window. This kind of duplicate post cannot be attributed to hitting submit twice, but seems to be simply a product of the 'give me the solution, and give it to me quick' mentality and the slightly misguided idea that repetition and restatement are replacements for patience and restraint. I think this type of duplicate posts are a bigger problem than the occasional accidental double post.

To a certain extent, this type of post can be dealt with by the standard voting and consideration systems, but as most of them seem to be by anonymonks (for a good reason, perhaps), that only goes a part of the way to dealing with them. Unfortunately, I don't quite see a solution to it, except to grin and bear it. Ignoring these posts seems only to produce more of them...

Do any other monks have any thoughts on this?

CU
Robartes-