Duplicate/Should Have Searched flags

feature
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For forums with feature request / bug report categories, it’s not uncommon for duplicate bug reports / feature requests to be filed. For all forums, there’s the issue of people not liking to use the search feature and immediately jump to posting whatever is on their mind. The forum I’m part does have feature requests / bug reports, and while we don’t use Discourse (yet), both the existing forum software and Discourse do not provide good ways for dealing with both duplicates and people who neglect to use the search feature (yes I’m aware Discourse suggests similar posts when you’re drafting your own, but more on that later).

With duplicate reports/requests, I’ve noticed that even when someone points out that it’s a duplicate feature request, no matter how nice or mean they word it, and regardless if it’s the first reply on the topic or not, discussion still continues. Forum members will prefer to discuss features / bugs on the most recent topic, probably because one or all of the following:

  • it feels wrong for them to resurrect a topic that hasn’t been posted on in so long
  • they want to respond to someone’s suggestion/outlook but it’s only on the new topic and not the old one
  • they didn’t see the “this is a duplicate topic” post and continue leaving feedback on the topic

It’s really difficult to manually moderate that kind of stuff and merge topics so often – I really like the way Discourse headed with the automatic flagging system that took the workload off the moderators’ backs, and duplicate post flagging could do some good.

As for posting topics before using the search feature, it becomes a problem because:

  • People make a goof every now and then and forget to use the search feature, but similar to how even though birthdays are rare, only taking 0.27% (a single day) of the entire year, so many people exist on Earth that there are countless birthdays per day, because of the volume of members on the forum it’s not uncommon to see posts that could have been answered by searching because there are such a large amount of people tripping up occasionally.

  • Since there isn’t a “should have searched” flag to slowly eat away at their trust level and boot them out if and when they continue to ignore the search feature because they don’t feel like using it, manual moderation is the only way to get rid of these people. “Oh you should have used the search” isn’t exactly “this guy should be removed” material, so this results in these people never being removed and they continue to poison the forum. This manual moderation babysitting is also the exact opposite direction of the one Discourse is going in the event that moderators actively work to oust these types of people.

  • Just linking to topics where the question has already been answered does not motivate people to use the search feature in the future (this comes from personal experience – they don’t realize they’re inconveniencing others when they could have just searched it themselves), telling them “please use the search feature” (either on their topic or in a PM) comes off as rude, and since you’re calling them out they get super defensive about it or they just don’t care that they’re inconveniencing other people and in either case telling them doesn’t work.

Looking back at “Your topic is similar to”,

forum members may forget that it exists after a certain period of time, ignore it and not care about it, or close it because it gets in the way. It also may not provide perfect matches to similar topics and posters would assume there was no similar topic even though they would have found it through the search feature. Additionally, we’ve had problems with topics where they start repeating themselves ever couple of pages – people are lazy and don’t want to read the whole topic before posting so they end up asking the same questions over and over and over. We can’t start booting people left and right for this because so many people do it, and just telling them not to doesn’t stop them from doing that in the future. I’d also like to point out that StackExchange has the “your topic is similar to” notification as well, but the community can still flag topics as duplicates – it’s because the “your topic is similar to”, while helpful in solving the problem, does not solve the problem completely.

Getting a PM that says your post/topic has been hidden because it was flagged by the community and knowing that if you continue that behavior you will eventually get booted from the community provides excellent motivation to improve behavior, and I’m sure the Discourse team knows that very well. It would be amazing if there were flags for duplicate posts / should have used the search feature or read the topic in general so duplicate posts and people who are too quick to post manageable, and preventing moderators from having to babysit the forum with manual moderation every time this occurs. When flagged for being a duplicate topic, it should automatically either be merged with the original topic or closed and linked to the original topic (merging it directly might result in weird results). When flagged for not using the search feature / reading the topic, the post should be hidden automatically like if it were spam and the poster notified in their inbox that it had already been answered (with links people provided to the post(s) that had answered their question).

2 Likes
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This is a lot of words to process. What is your proposal? Can you post a visual mockup of how it would work?

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My TLDR, he is asking for a new flag type.

Honestly I do not think its such a big deal to reply with a comment and flag for moderation.

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Thank you for the quick responses! You are correct in your summarization of the original post (actually two flag types though). The forum software I use currently requires manual moderation of duplicate threads / posts. I am speaking through personal experience that manual moderation does not work.

Asking things that have already been answered on the same thread seems innocent enough that forum moderators won’t delete them (they’d have to micromanage the forum to do that even if they opted to, so they wouldn’t want to bother with it), and then a couple of pages later it’s grown out of control and further pages are almost exact duplicates of previous pages. This is why I ask for an automatic way to deal with people who don’t read threads before posting – threads that repeat themselves are not useful for feedback, and when you get to the point where people are saying the same thing repeatedly the forum staff bail out since it’s not worth the effort to sift through duplicate posts (again, coming from personal experience). After the thread is abandoned by the forum staff, further feedback by forum members is for naught. Flags were created so the moderators wouldn’t have to get involved in every little problem – this seems like it fits into exactly what flags were created for.

As for the duplicates, ask yourself why they are a problem. It separates discussion on the same topic into multiple threads, making it difficult and more time consuming for developers to gather feedback. In the case of the forum I’m a part of, the developers and staff members are the same, so with reporting duplicates and having the staff take care of it, does that really help? Instead of spending time sifting through duplicate threads, they’re now manually having to micromanage the forums. Manual reports sadly do not solve the problem. This is why I am requesting a flag to mark posts as duplicates.

tl;dr duplicate flag and “use search / read thread” (for lack of a better name) flags

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Just for reference, I’m assuming the “Something Else” under flagging does not automatically hide posts and that moderators have to manually jump in if a post is flagged for something else. Is this a correct assumption? As the forum I used hasn’t switched to Discourse yet, all I have to go on is this topic on flags, and codinghorror mentions:

Since “something else” can be an infinite number of reasons, I thought filing a flag under “something else” did not apply to this since three different flags could be for completely different things. If 3 “something else” flags automatically hides posts, then there is no need for two new flags – users can still help keep the community clean with something else without having to wait for moderators to manually clean up posts.

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The modal currently has 5 options
3 Flags in the proper sense

  • Off-topic
  • Inappropriate
  • Spam

and 2 Messages

  • to the poster
  • to Moderators (the “something else”)

The Messages do not “Flag” nor count as Flags against the member

The “something else” can be a lot of things, including
The post needs MarkDown formatting
The member didn’t Edit a prior post but made another, identical but with additional text
The replies have become redundant and the topic should probably be closed
The member had poor luck in a category and instead of asking for the topic to be moved started another cross-post in a different category

I may be a “softie” but IMHO though they do cause more work for Moderators they are for the most part not “offenses” unless and until a member intentionally continues the practice.

I’d say that for our Moderators the most common issue is posts needing MarkDown formatting. (well, that and asking “please provide more information”)

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Yes. (Just in case that wasn’t clear from @Mittineague’s explanation of the options.)

It’s a useful option, because it lets the member flagging explain what they think is wrong, but leaves it to mods to deal with. So duplicate topics, “should be merged with …”, “should be split”, “should be moved to…” are all suitable here.

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On https://community.signalusers.org/ we have in the magnitude of 15 duplicates a day. It would be very helpful if forum users can flag a topic or post as duplicate and provide an URL to the topic to which it is a duplicate. The standard action when a moderator agrees would be to make the topic hidden, lock it, and add the post “This topic is a duplicate of [link to other forum topic] and has therefore been closed.”

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This is already possible, though, isn’t it?

  • select flag button
  • select “something else” flag type
  • type "dupe of "
  • paste URL
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This, and as well, if this was a default reason for flagging, it would force communities that want to use this software to not allow duplicate topics as a guideline. While duplicate topics are generally frowned upon in most places that may not be the case for a very small portion of those. I would probably support allowing admins to add their own predefined flag reasons, although im sure there are requests for that already. Something Else usually works fine though.

2 Likes
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What I am missing is not only the flag, but much more do the actions moderators can take ro handle duplicates. I would like an option to agree with the flag, followed by

  1. Hide the topic
  2. Lock the topic
  3. Post as system “this topic is a duplicate of [url].”

So as to stop the topic for being suggested when topics are searched
Stop people from continuei g the discussion in this duplicate thread
And show with a post to all who still visit this topic why it was locked and hidden and where the original topic is at.

As of today we are taking these steps manually on every duplicate topic, but it consumes a lot of time.

What I am looking for might not be the flag, but is the action “close as duplicate of [url]”

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Yes, but having founded Stack Overflow I can tell you that what you are asking for is far, far, far more difficult than you can imagine.

What people really want is a magic “automatically detect this is a duplicate and fix it for the user” button and that is … astonishingly difficult to implement. Basically you will never defeat an infinite army of randomly typing people who are unwilling or unable to do the work to search first before posting… all you can really do is make it much more difficult for them to post, thus forcing them to do the searching they should have done in the first place.

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But now you are saying I am already asking for such automated feature. I don’t have to handle millions of visitors like stack overflow does. We are dealing with I think sbout 30 new topics a day some of which are duplicates. There is room for human reviewing and even a little discussion. What I ask for is not having to repeat the action of pressing “agree” pressing “hide” then finding the topic back and pressing “lock” and then writing a post “This is a duplicate of [copy paste an url]”.

If the flag is called “duplicate of” and asks the flagger to submit an url, that mean the URL is readily available for the moderator and he only has to agree or disagree. If he agrees the standard action could be to lock, hide and post an automated “this is a duplicate of [url]” reply and the moderator never needs to leave the review que.

It’s not that automated system, it’s just a little more automation than we have already.

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My experience with users is that they won’t do anything you ask them to do, and they will not read any text you put on the screen.

With that limitation in mind, the moderator tooling could improve, because I do think moderators will (generally) do what you ask them to do, and will read what is on the screen… so perhaps focus on that.

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Great. Btw the idea for a seperate flag is only to encurrage the flagger to provide the url of the original topic. On the forum I moderate we usually have users flagging something else with the description “duplicate of [url]”. I would love to grab that url and have the system post an ‘offical’ statement that this is indeed a duplicate of that url. For that I proposed the seperate ‘duplicate of’ flag so the input can be just the required url.

In the moderator view it would be helpful to see the title and date of the refered to (supposedly original) topic.

And it would be great to filter the review que on flag type duplicate

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Sure, if you could provide a rough mockup focusing on what we could do to improve the moderator tools here, that’d be helpful.

1 Like