Double posts

TubaDiva also monitors the SDMB fairly closely, and she is usually pretty good about letting everyone know what she has done.

And some mods tend to be dismissive. Not all, maybe not most, but that dismissive attitude does the mods no good. If everyone was like TubaDiva, there would be no complaint.

I wonder why some users are having all these problems and I am having none of them.

It might have something to do with the ISP. Not everyone can afford top line internet, some of us have to do with low grade providers.

You called Colibri dismissive upthread when he was being as helpful as he could be under the circumstances. I am not aware of any cases of any of the mods here actually being dismissive.

It’s worse on the weekends, and it is significantly more likely to happen in longer threads. I’m guessing server load is tied into it.

There are some issues here, like all posts being marked read when they haven’t been, that do seem to pick on some users much more than others. Again, the issues seem to be related to server load (though it seems that there is more than just server load involved), but why it picks on some people more than others is something that we haven’t been able to determine.

All the people at this site are USERS. They have no control over the hardware/software infrastructure that provides the environment for the SDMB. It is up to the web hosting company that has provided this space to handle these problems. All the SDMB can do is bring the problems to their attention. That’s it.

Hah! We have people here who would complain even if they lived in the Garden of Eden. LOL

It depends. The browser seems to be part of it but how old a version comes into play. My system qualifies as a collectable and it will sometimes allow it to happen but usually not. Remember – with some of the errors something is already going wrong. For it to “multiply” in some cases is no great shock.

In my experience, using Quick Reply is significantly more likely to result in a double post than using Post Reply. I haven’t played around with it but I suspect that Quick Reply lacks the double post protection that was added to Post Reply a while back.

As far as I am aware, none of these issues are dependent on what type of browser you are using.

Your knowledge of current trends is far beyond mine; heck the knowledge of some OOD from Goshen is far beyond mine when it comes to computers. But I have a lot more issues with my Safari Version 5.1.10 than I do my Firefox 48.0.2 on the SDMB.

Yeah – I know – time for a new computer. I’m working on it. :smiley:

I spent a large part of my professional career diagnosing problems like this. The double and triple postings are probably caused by a race condition. Here’s what happens:

A user tries to post something. The board software checks for a double-post, and not finding any, then tries to post the message, but gets stuck for some reason before the posting is completed.

The user gets frustrated because the initial attempt at posting hasn’t completed, so tries again. Again, the board software checks for a double-post. Again, it doesn’t fine one, because the initial posting hasn’t finished. So the software tries to post the message.

Eventually, whatever is causing the postings to be blocked goes away. Both postings have already been checked at this point, so both are completed, and we get a double post.

Most of the time this doesn’t happen because the time window between the making the check and completing the post is very small. But when delays are introduced, it gets big enough that double posts become more likely.

It would be possible to completely prevent double-postings by preventing a user from posting anything at all if that user already has a posting in progress. This could be costly, and would be hard to implement without causing other problems, the biggest one being locks left behind when a connection is lost.

There could be a clue here. Apparently, whatever is causing the delays (which often results in timeouts) happens sometime after the double-posting check but before the posting is visible to other threads. Someone who is intimately familiar with the internals of the board software might use this to help figure out what the problem is.

That may explain some double posts but it does not explain all of them — I have gotten some double posts even though I press ‘Sublit Reply’ only once.