I just replied to a thread and I guess I accidentally hit “reply” twice, because when it took me to the next screen I got a message saying something along the lies of “You have already posted to this thread within the last five minutes, you will now be taken back to the thread”. But my reply was there - once.
While restricting posts to more than 60 secs apart helps prevent the double-post problem, it is also a security measure available in vBulletin. Imagine what might happen if someone wrote a script to post continuously, as fast as computer, server and bandwidth would allow. Restricting posts to no often than one per minute doesn’t seem like much of a limitation to humans, but would reduce attacks like this to the point where they could be detected and managed.
IANAMod, so this is just a WAG. I’m actually curious why this wasn’t implemented sooner, as it was available in vB 2.x before the changeover to 3. I believe the time between posts can be set to any number of seconds, so even 27 might be used if 60 seemed too long.
However, raz, to me, a simulpost means two different users posting at the same time, or at least having the same time-stamp minute. So this would have no effect on that.
The 60 second limit on posts has been in place for a long time. There is also a 30 second limit on searches, IIRC. I suppose it could prevent double posts, but sometimes the boards just hiccup a bit and a double post gets through regardless of the delay. Also, double posts are often several minutes apart, like when the boards appear to hang and the poster returns to the Reply page to hit Submit again. Even if the " thank you for posting" page hangs, 9 times out of 10 the post has actually gone through.
As of the previous version, we also had a feature which wouldn’t allow two posts with the same text adjacent to each other, regardless of the time between them. In principle, that should have eliminated double-posts, too. It didn’t. Most double posts come when the server is at its busiest, and some of those nifty features are given a low priority, so things can still fall through the cracks.