

Tell HN: URL encoding and duplicate posting - pietrofmaggi

Not a big deal, just a note on a slow friday.<p>Submitting articles to HN sometimes has a neat feature that check if URL was already submitted (increasing the voting of the first one). This to avoid duplication.<p>Just seems that the check does not parse URL encoding. As a test look at:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1991171<p>submitted as: http://www.davidflanagan.com/2010/12/let-it%2Dsnow.html<p>and<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1989457<p>submitted as: http://www.davidflanagan.com/2010/12/let-it-snow.html<p>Back to programming mode.
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RiderOfGiraffes
I suspect that people occasionally use the simplicity of the URL detector as a
feature, deliberately changing the URL in trivial ways so they can submit
items they know or suspect will be popular.

More often, though, people just don't check at all and submit items with no
checking at all. This leads to duplicate submissions, a crowded "New" page,
and split disussions.

I just wish people would read more, so they'd have a chance of knowing that
the cool thing they've just seen and want to submit has already been
submitted, sometimes many times over. The Dup Detector is sufficiently simply
(for which read "brain-dead") that it can't be relied on.

ADDED IN EDIT: Cool! A down-vote! I always appreciate the opportunity to learn
something. If you've down-voted this, or have a reason why someone might,
please reply with more explanation so I can understand the alternative point
of view. Thanks.

~~~
jacquesm
> A down-vote!

Your first I gather :) ?

Fixed.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes

      >> A down-vote!
      > Your first I gather :) ?
    

<grin> You know me better than that.

I just always find it frustrating when I submit something or say something
that I genuinely believe adds value to the site, and then it gets down-voted
with no explanation. A down-vote will make me re-evaluate the information
content, and sometimes I will, upon reflection, delete a comment. If it was
content-less then I'll move on, but if I thought there was content, I'll try
to rephrase and be clearer and more positive.

But when I think a comment has value and yet it gets a down-vote with no
explanation, I find that frustrating.

It happens, I know, and it's no big deal, but I value the opportunity to
learn.

    
    
      > Fixed.
    

Thanks, although it doesn't explain why someone thought it was worth the down-
vote in the first place. <fx: sigh> Never mind, moving on ...

~~~
jacquesm
I know. One thing you can do to combat this is to revisit discussions after
they've died down and check out the negative comments, see if there were any
'drive-by's' that could do with a re-balancing of the force.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
One side-effect of the duplicate-detection I do is that I re-read old
discussions. That lets me up-vote older comments that I think deserve it. I've
found some gems like that, which in part is why I continue the dup-detector
activity "by hand" (in the main).

And thanks for the up-vote.

------
jacquesm
There are many more ways to mess with the dupe filter (this is by no means an
exhaustive list):

\- adding or removing www. from the url (if it has it in there, and if the
site redirects)

\- deleting a url and re-submitting it if it does not pick up enough votes in
the time it take so scroll off the newpage

\- adding a ? or # to the end of the URL

The dupe filter is a way for people that play nice to continue to play nice, I
don't think it ever was advertised as hyper secure. It's like the lock on the
barn door, it stops the most trivial attempts and serves as an indicator of
desired behaviour but it is not so secure that it can't be tampered with.

A really good dupe detector would actually be a lot harder than it probably
seems.

