Reply to: Duplicate threads

[NickFitz]

You could narrow it down by asking the thread starters if they were using the app

I had a feeling I saw a dupe thread sometime in the last week or two, but maybe that's déjà vu

[Churchill]

It's admin fcking with your brains! Ban him!

[amcdonald]

Is it possible to delete a thread if you started it, to kill a duplicate ?

[northernladuk]

So shout me if you see any dupes and we can try and work out what is happening.

Admin I have seen one! Psychocandy is trying to dupe clients in to thinking he is a skilled professional resource and he is worth hiring. Can I have my gold star now?

[mudskipper]

Cheers Nick. I thought Mudskipper's post was a complaint about the parody threads, hence my comment about the ban hammer. I haven't seen any deleted posts that were dupes, can you link me up with any dupe posts or threads please. Will PM the mods as well.

Yes, have updated the tapatalk app (yesterday) so if these have just started appearing then this is the likely cause.

The old version has been in for about three months and had no problems so if we are seeing dupe posts since yesterday then this could well be it.

It is only the Android version that has been updated so far, the Apple one is still awaiting approval, and has been since last Friday!

I haven't announced the update as I want to remove the shared tapatalk app and just use the self-published one, but no point getting the old tapatalk app users to update to the new one until the iOS one is approved.

So shout me if you see any dupes and we can try and work out what is happening.

I think your super-efficient early morning mod combined the duplicate threads.

They were the ones listed in my original post - one of them did have a spacing change suggesting the user did edit before the repost. My duplicate 'duplicate threads' post, was a parody...

Perhaps some of the original dupe posters can comment on what happened?

[northernladuk]

Ban Hammer?? Wotchu talkin about Lewis?

Oh hang on there is a hammer...
Move along nothing to see here!

[administrator]

Cheers Nick. I thought Mudskipper's post was a complaint about the parody threads, hence my comment about the ban hammer. I haven't seen any deleted posts that were dupes, can you link me up with any dupe posts or threads please. Will PM the mods as well.

Yes, have updated the tapatalk app (yesterday) so if these have just started appearing then this is the likely cause.

The old version has been in for about three months and had no problems so if we are seeing dupe posts since yesterday then this could well be it.

It is only the Android version that has been updated so far, the Apple one is still awaiting approval, and has been since last Friday!

I haven't announced the update as I want to remove the shared tapatalk app and just use the self-published one, but no point getting the old tapatalk app users to update to the new one until the iOS one is approved.

So shout me if you see any dupes and we can try and work out what is happening.

[NickFitz]

Has it anything to do with the new mobile app? (I have my suspicions... )

Could be. One hypothesis is that the mobile app attempts to be resilient in the face of loss of network connection by caching any HTTP POSTs that don't get through and retrying them later, and some bug means it's doing that even though the POST did succeed. (Incidentally, this points up an intractable problem with the creation of new resources via an unreliable network; and all networks are unreliable.)

It could even not be a bug: maybe those users did briefly lose connectivity as they posted, so the app genuinely had no reason to be aware of the success in posting. I'd suggest the app should prompt the user as to whether to repost, though of course the user may not know whether to or not, or may just hit "Yes" without reading.

It's a very tricky problem, which can't easily be resolved unless both the client and server applications have been written with the presumption of interrupted connectivity. (Even then it's not exactly "easy".)

[cojak]

It would be interesting to know what's causing the duplicates. Although they have exactly the same content, the timestamps are a couple of minutes later. It seems unlikely that vBulletin is somehow duplicating them, as all the POSTed data will evaporate after the first submission, and there's no obvious way it could be resurrected in such a way as to be available for processing into a new thread.

One other avenue is that the same HTTP POST is being submitted twice, a few minutes apart. This would suggest broken client software such as a browser (or a broken HTTP networking stack) that the unwitting victims are all using. (Could it be the Tapatalk app?) Or maybe some ISP has an intermediary proxy of some kind which has lost its marbles, and the relevant threads all travelled through it when first submitted.

Or it could be admin messing with our heads late at night

Has it anything to do with the new mobile app? (I have my suspicions... )

[eek]

Nah, it's warm up the banhammer day

Does that mean we can pay £10 to ban someone for a day again.....

[NickFitz]

(Could it be the Tapatalk app?)

Similar problem with same vB version posted on the Tapatalk forum a week ago: https://support.tapatalk.com/threads...threads.21385/

[NickFitz]

It would be interesting to know what's causing the duplicates. Although they have exactly the same content, the timestamps are a couple of minutes later. It seems unlikely that vBulletin is somehow duplicating them, as all the POSTed data will evaporate after the first submission, and there's no obvious way it could be resurrected in such a way as to be available for processing into a new thread.

One other avenue is that the same HTTP POST is being submitted twice, a few minutes apart. This would suggest broken client software such as a browser (or a broken HTTP networking stack) that the unwitting victims are all using. (Could it be the Tapatalk app?) Or maybe some ISP has an intermediary proxy of some kind which has lost its marbles, and the relevant threads all travelled through it when first submitted.

Or it could be admin messing with our heads late at night

[Dactylion]

Thats not a ban hammer, THIS is a ban hammer.....



As wielded by Cojak

Ban Hammer?? Wotchu talkin about Lewis?

Oh hang on there is a hammer...
Move along nothing to see here!

[OwlHoot]

Have to admit I find these duplicate threads quite irritating and tiresome, and in my opinion they detract from the forum generally. ..

WHS, although I have been guilty of similar parody threads once or twice in the past so can't grumble too much.

[NotAllThere]

NAT's up early!

Morning

Morning. Sorry for the delay - I went off to the office.