My Little Pony, I Love My Little Pony.

March 6, 2007 11:57 PM

Ooops, I did it again. I made a comment and once again it resulted in an accidental triple comment, a product (I suspect) of some sort of clash between my work server and Metafilter's server. It's not the first time it's happened either. And although all but one of my triple-comment will (hopefully) have been deleted by the time I finish writing this post (I have e-mailed an admin, as I usually do whenever it happens), it's getting annoying. Matt, I know you're really busy providing us with an awesome site, but could you please institute some kind of delay of just a few seconds between the time that someone has posted a comment and the time that they can comment again? They have one over at Metafilter's twin, Devoter, so surely it can't be that hard to do, can it? And best of all, it'll have plent of other benefits to the site (preventing abuse etc) and better yet, you, cortex and the ever suffering jessamyn will never have to get another e-mail from me asking you to delete two of my comments. Matt, please, can this be done?
posted by Effigy2000 to Feature Requests at 11:57 PM (26 comments total)

MeFi has a twin?
Like in that episode where Spock has a goatee and is real mean?
Hope my alternate self has a better mortgage rate.
posted by Dizzy at 1:25 AM on March 7, 2007

By the way, yes, I'm aware that an even easier solution is for me simply not to post from work... but c'mon. I'm only human.
posted by Effigy2000 at 1:46 AM on March 7, 2007

I got nothin' to say about your triples, but congrats on that engagement!
posted by maryh at 2:36 AM on March 7, 2007

While a slight timer would be best (but probably infeasible to implement), a nix on posting a comment whose contents are identical to the last comment in the thread (if said last comment was yours) would be pretty dang good, and hopefully not harsh on too many snark opportunities.
posted by blasdelf at 2:47 AM on March 7, 2007

that particular triple is sublime if you read it in ray's voice.

at k-mart.

at k-mart.
posted by quonsar at 4:05 AM on March 7, 2007

I really don't have anything to say about the triple posting, but I want to add that while Devoter doesn't really look that much like MeFi's twin, it does look interesting. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
posted by TedW at 5:01 AM on March 7, 2007

The actual fix would be to let you edit/delete your comment for 2 mins or so after posting it.
posted by Firas at 6:10 AM on March 7, 2007

a nix on posting a comment whose contents are identical to the last comment in the thread

We have that, but I need to do a transaction lock thing so that you can squeak in two copies microseconds after the first one, before a check can be completed.

I'll work on it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:26 AM on March 7, 2007 [1 favorite]

Regardless of which, flagging a comment as "double", if you manage by whatever means to create one, is a good way to get it cleaned up by whoever looks at the flag queue next.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:56 AM on March 7, 2007

I have an awesome mortgage rate. I must be Dizzy's alternate self.

*strokes goatee*
posted by frykitty at 7:05 AM on March 7, 2007

I just ran over and registered the name "norm" on devoter... I may not ever use it, but damn, if I don't do it, someone else will.
posted by norm at 7:14 AM on March 7, 2007

I just ran over and registered the name "norm" on devoter... I may not ever use it, but damn, if I don't do it, someone else will.

Have I got a site for you...
posted by Rhomboid at 8:07 AM on March 7, 2007

I always forget about Devoter. Since there is a solid thing going on over there, can we be more stringent on nixing PoliticalFilter screeds on the blue? Similar to a MetaChat-style dismissal.
posted by potch at 9:01 AM on March 7, 2007

Devoter is nice, but it looks really unprofessional with that brown background.
posted by Roger Dodger at 9:04 AM on March 7, 2007 [1 favorite]

Hmm, I also have both a good mortgage rate and a goatee. Ergo, I must be someone's evil twin.

Excellent.
posted by quin at 1:20 PM on March 7, 2007

*strokes goatse*
posted by homunculus at 1:51 PM on March 7, 2007

*strokes goatse*

STOP YOU FOOL YOU'LL FALL IN
posted by loquacious at 4:14 PM on March 7, 2007

This isn't perfect, but it's relatively easy.

If you embedded in the "post comment" form a hidden element that was the MD5 hash of the concatenation of the date and time the page loaded + the user name + your salt, and stored this as a unique key in your database, you could easily reject comments posted within a minute of each other by the same user.

Additionally, you could prevent people from working around this, since they wouldn't be able to reproduce a valid time + user + salt hash.
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 4:57 PM on March 7, 2007

You don't want to reject comments from within a minute of each other, just the same comment twice.

I thought the solution to this was stick a big unique (random, always increasing, whatever) number on each comment form served, in a hidden field, and just don't let the same comment form get used twice. (that is, add a column to the comments table that says what comment form got used to submit it, and don't allow resubmissions from the same comment form)
posted by aubilenon at 5:15 PM on March 7, 2007

Or locking out the comment process (by user-and-thread) for the slice of time it requires to do the atomic create-and-cross-reference bit of the posting. Semaphores ho!
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:22 PM on March 7, 2007

People still have goatees?
posted by maxwelton at 5:42 PM on March 7, 2007

Devoter: 3 comments max per thread. ZZZZZ.
posted by fourcheesemac at 7:02 PM on March 7, 2007

Hey cortex, off topic, but I was wondering, did you take your screen name from these guys? Because their song "5 seconds" came up on a cdr mix in my car this week, and when I checked it in itunes, cortex came up, and my first thought was that it was something I grabbed from mefi music. Just wondering.
posted by vronsky at 8:45 PM on March 7, 2007

No, my screen name has no compelling back story. I was just picking a neuro-related nick for a set of themed usernames on a group server we were setting up. Never heard of those guys, but I've never heard of anybody, pretty much.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:53 PM on March 7, 2007

I thought the same thing fourcheesemac, I mean the Libby conviction story is arguably pretty big news. At the time of this comment, it looks like it's raked in a whopping three comments.

Which is a real shame because it does appear that there is some pretty good newsfilter stuff being posted there.

[disclosure: I joined.]
posted by quin at 9:16 PM on March 7, 2007

Cool - I hadn't heard of them either. I think I picked them up from the now defunct music blog postpunkjunk.com. Surprisingly good.
posted by vronsky at 9:32 PM on March 7, 2007