Doubled posts on the blue

June 4, 2005 9:10 PM

I've noticed a fair bit of double posts recently on MeFi (not AskMefi nor MeTa).
Here (keswick), here (bugbread) and here (3.2.3.) Is there some newly introduced bug in the posting code?
posted by birdsquared to Bugs at 9:10 PM (17 comments total)

uh, no?

it's pretty easy to post twice by mistake.
posted by puke & cry at 9:30 PM on June 4, 2005

Yes, probably something has changed. At one time if you refreshed the page in which you had already submitted a comment, the comment would be resubmitted, but then Matt fixed that, so I'm guessing that some changes are being made and that maybe little fixes here and there haven't been reincorporated yet.
posted by taz at 9:43 PM on June 4, 2005

test
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:38 PM on June 4, 2005

just once here. lemme try on metafilter proper.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:39 PM on June 4, 2005

No, it's called hitting the back button after the submit, going to another tab, doing stuff, and going back, seeing the comment, thinking it hasn't posted, hitting "post" again, and whammo, I'm an idiot.

Since we're talking about posting code, has the actual posting process been lagging for everyone else, or just me?
posted by keswick at 10:39 PM on June 4, 2005

Far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong and nothing changed in my code.

Go ahead and try to post two comments with the same exact text in them here.

Often people make a tiny edit and hit submit again, and the code checking for differences (it does a hash of the comment content) doesn't see them as the same. Even submitting an extra space or comma is enough to give a comment an entirely new hash.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:41 PM on June 4, 2005

I did it when I typed a post, hit Post, then the site locked up. About 10 mins later I came back to that window. It was still spinning so I hit reload. It was still in preview mode, so I hit Post again. Double.
posted by belling at 10:48 PM on June 4, 2005

Looking at it more carefully now, it appears that 3.2.3 had an italic code in the first post that wasn't in the second, but bugbread's two look to be the same, and keswick seems to be indicating that his two posts were the same. Is there some way of manually checking the hash for two separate posts to see if they do indeed differ? (Would the time lag be enough to produce a different hash?)
posted by birdsquared at 11:43 PM on June 4, 2005

Oh, and by the way, thanks Matt, for all your efforts at improving the useability of the site. You hopefully get a lot of that via email, too.
posted by birdsquared at 11:50 PM on June 4, 2005

keswick : "No, it's called hitting the back button after the submit, going to another tab, doing stuff, and going back, seeing the comment, thinking it hasn't posted, hitting 'post' again, and whammo, I'm an idiot."

I doublechecked, and that is indeed what happened to me. Sorry, folks.
posted by Bugbread at 12:02 AM on June 5, 2005

While we're on the subject, I've found that recently metafilter sites don't return any response when hitting post. They just sit there forever after sending the request waiting for a response, and if you wait a while they comment does appear in the thread, but the server never sends an HTTP reply. It might be related to my replacing the preview button with a post button in javascript, which I'll test now.
posted by fvw at 3:00 AM on June 5, 2005

Yup, that would appear to be the cause. Anyone have any idea why changing the value of the Preview button to "Post" would cause this?
posted by fvw at 3:02 AM on June 5, 2005

I stand corrected, I do get an HTTP response but it never completes.
posted by fvw at 3:04 AM on June 5, 2005

i had exactly what belling had when i double-commented last night.
posted by amberglow at 10:41 AM on June 5, 2005

I deleted a few of these double-comments today, I think, in case some of the links in the main post here mysteriously go to single comments in-thread.
posted by jessamyn at 11:12 AM on June 5, 2005

Censorship! I'm cutting off my own hand!
posted by Mid at 11:46 AM on June 5, 2005

Can I have it? I have this itch on my back that I can't quite reach.
posted by dg at 7:40 PM on June 5, 2005