Duplicate/Should Have Searched flags

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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).

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Mark a topic as duplicate, close and or merge
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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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Em https://community.signalusers.org/ temos cerca de 15 duplicatas por dia. Seria muito útil se os usuários do fórum pudessem sinalizar um tópico ou postagem como duplicata e fornecer um URL para o tópico ao qual ela é uma duplicata. A ação padrão, quando um moderador concorda, seria tornar o tópico oculto, bloqueá-lo e adicionar a mensagem: “Este tópico é uma duplicata de [link para outro tópico do fórum] e, portanto, foi encerrado.”

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Isso já é possível, não é?

  • Selecione o botão de sinalizar
  • Selecione o tipo de sinalização “outra coisa”
  • Digite "duplicado de "
  • Cole o URL
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Isso, e também, se essa fosse uma razão padrão para sinalização, forçaria comunidades que desejam usar esse software a não permitir tópicos duplicados como diretriz. Embora tópicos duplicados sejam geralmente mal vistos na maioria dos lugares, isso pode não ser o caso para uma pequena parte deles. Eu provavelmente apoiaria permitir que administradores adicionem suas próprias razões pré-definidas para sinalização, embora tenha certeza de que já existam solicitações para isso. No entanto, a opção ‘Outra Coisa’ geralmente funciona bem.

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11

O que me falta não é apenas a bandeira, mas muito mais as ações que os moderadores podem tomar para lidar com duplicatas. Gostaria de uma opção para concordar com a bandeira, seguida por:

  1. Ocultar o tópico
  2. Bloquear o tópico
  3. Postar como sistema: “Este tópico é uma duplicata de [url].”

Isso para impedir que o tópico seja sugerido ao pesquisar tópicos,
impedir que as pessoas continuem a discussão neste tópico duplicado
e mostrar, com uma postagem, a todos que ainda visitam este tópico, por que ele foi bloqueado e ocultado e onde está o tópico original.

Hoje, realizamos essas etapas manualmente em cada tópico duplicado, mas isso consome muito tempo.

O que estou procurando pode não ser a bandeira, mas sim a ação “fechar como duplicata de [url]”.

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Sim, mas como fundei o Stack Overflow, posso dizer que o que você está pedindo é muito, muito, muito mais difícil do que você pode imaginar.

O que as pessoas realmente querem é um botão mágico de “detectar automaticamente que isso é uma duplicata e corrigir para o usuário”, e isso é… surpreendentemente difícil de implementar. Basicamente, você nunca derrotará um exército infinito de pessoas digitando aleatoriamente que não querem ou não conseguem fazer o trabalho de pesquisar antes de postar… tudo o que você realmente pode fazer é tornar muito mais difícil para elas postarem, assim forçando-as a fazer a pesquisa que deveriam ter feito desde o início.

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Mas agora você está dizendo que já estou pedindo um recurso automatizado desse tipo. Não preciso lidar com milhões de visitantes como o Stack Overflow faz. Estamos lidando, creio eu, com cerca de 30 novos tópicos por dia, alguns dos quais são duplicatas. Há espaço para revisão humana e até mesmo para um pouco de discussão. O que peço é não ter que repetir a ação de clicar em “concordar”, clicar em “ocultar”, encontrar o tópico novamente, clicar em “travar” e depois escrever uma postagem “Isso é uma duplicata de [colar um URL]”.

Se a bandeira se chamar “duplicata de” e pedir que quem a sinalize envie um URL, isso significa que o URL já estará disponível para o moderador, que só precisará concordar ou discordar. Se ele concordar, a ação padrão poderia ser travar, ocultar e postar automaticamente uma resposta “Isso é uma duplicata de [URL]”, e o moderador nunca precisaria sair da fila de revisão.

Não se trata de um sistema totalmente automatizado, apenas de um pouco mais de automação do que já temos.

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Minha experiência com usuários é que eles não farão nada do que você pedir e não lerão nenhum texto que você colocar na tela.

Com essa limitação em mente, as ferramentas para **moderadores_ poderiam melhorar, porque eu acredito que os moderadores (geralmente) farão o que você pedir e lerão o que está na tela… então, talvez seja melhor focar nisso.

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15

Ótimo. Aliás, a ideia de uma bandeira separada é apenas para incentivar quem sinaliza a fornecer o URL do tópico original. No fórum que moderamos, geralmente temos usuários sinalizando algo diferente com a descrição “duplicata de [url]”. Eu adoraria pegar esse URL e fazer com que o sistema publique uma declaração “oficial” de que se trata, de fato, de uma duplicata daquele URL. Para isso, propus a bandeira separada “duplicata de”, para que a entrada seja apenas o URL necessário.

Na visão do moderador, seria útil ver o título e a data do tópico referido (supostamente o original).

E seria ótimo filtrar a fila de revisão por tipo de bandeira duplicata.

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Claro, se você puder fornecer um esboço aproximado focando no que poderíamos fazer para melhorar as ferramentas de moderador aqui, isso seria útil.

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