Repeat questions

[moose!]

Either people just aren't using it properly or your method of checking for duplicate questions isn't good enough but in the quizzes section the same question has been asked 7 times and to be honest I no longer care how many sides a snowflake has!!  :0)

 

Is there anything that can be done?

 

(PS. After pressing submit I noticed this question is also a duplicate but I love the irony of this so will post it anyway!)

[AB Editor]

Hmmmm...shall I ban this question for being a "duplicate"...or shall I simply point out that the same questions are often asked by different people, and that we at TheAnswerbank try to tolerate such behaviour?

[Potatoman]

I can see both sides of the coin here - Yes, its very annoying when someone does this, but can we expect everyone to trawl thru millions of questions before posting?

[moose!]

I realise it is a tricky one and I agree that hunting for questions would be silly however I don't think that seeing the same question asked 7 times in the 20 most recent would count as "trawling" and neither would asking the same question over 10 times in 4 different categories!

 

It seems that when popular quizzes are out this will keep occurring so if your databases can hold it and you are happy to tolerate it then I guess I'll just have to live with it.

 

I think there could be changes made to the system for matching duplicates (which is working well but perhaps isn't getting its message across).  If there is value in it I am happy to come up with suggestions?

[smouse]

Looks like the matching of duplicates is only carried out using the question title and not the content.  The question "6 S O A S" has now appeared on this entire site approximately 15 times but now I realise that is because it has been given lots of random titles, eg. "ALPANUMERIC QUIZ", "QUIZ QUESTION", "NEWPAPER PROBLEM"....none of which will easily identify a duplicate.

 

Obviously matching with the content will be much more difficult and risk two many matches coming up but it could be worth a beta-test version for regular posters?  Matching against older questions is probably less important as most quiz questions will have a life span of no more than a couple of months.

 

What do you think AB?