We had a run of duplicate submissions recently. Some of these are from people who've been around for a while, so I suspect that better documentation isn't the complete answer, and that some sort of mechanism is needed.

In thinking about the problem of duplicate submissions, I first though along the lines of doing some sort of textual analysis of a submission against the most recent N submissions. The simplest analysis would be a simple "eq" comparison. A more sophisticated would be to allow for a small number of differences, to catch people who post once, then backup to correct a typo and post again.

But I wonder now if a simpler check might be sufficient. On submitting a new, non-reply node, a quick check of the N most recent titles, for some small N (like 1, 2, or 3), would have caught the majority of the duplicate posts made in the last month.

If/when I accentally double-submit, I'd rather be told

You posted a node with the same title 47 seconds ago.
than discover that I'd goofed after the fact.

Does this sound workable, or am I missing something?

In reply to Double double Post post by dws

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.