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-

In reply to Re: Double double Post post by robartes
in thread 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.