Now that it’s pretty well established that the hamster sometimes skips a beat and posts twice or three times for us (sometimes with intervening posts from others), what is the protocol for the poster?
Ought we to be embarrassed? Ashamed? Ought we to shrug it off and forget about it? Ought we to post a notice that we apologize and that we did not intend to 2bl/3pl post? Ought we to request a mod delete one or more of them? Ought we to explain whether we are certain that we clicked submit only once, versus explaining that we got impatient and clicked again?
What, between pretending not to notice and flinging ourselves on a sword, ought we to do?
I initially struggled with this question too. But it no longer bothers me.
I vote to “shrug it off and forget about it.” Clearly, no one intends to double post. An apologetic post just contributes to the problem (albeit only slightly) and I think the mods shouldn’t waste their time trying to clean things up.
It doesn’t even bother me anymore to stumble across double posts while reading threads. I guess my expectation is that it’s going to happen. I’m surprised when I don’t see a double post in a long thread.
Lib, you beat me to starting this thread - I was wondering the same thing myself earlier today. I vote for just letting it ride, and not mentioning it.
a) Make your best effort not to double post. If the board times out after a submit, wait until you can pull up a new version of the thread again to see if your post is there before you try to submit again.
b) If you do double post, don’t create a new post to say “I double posted”. Everyone knows that already, and then it makes it even more confusing if/when a moderator deletes one of the duplicate posts.
I pretty well already knew that I ought not to try double/triple posting, and during my three year tenure here, I have been in strict adherence to Gaudere’s longstanding admonition that we “trust the CGI”. In fact, whenever I am in doubt as to whether my post has gone through, what I routinely do is close the window, start from scratch with a new browser window, go back into Straight Dope, hunt down my thread, and open it. (Even if the post doesn’t show on the index page, it might still be there. It doesn’t always update.)
Your (b) advice certainly makes sense. If you see a post that is duplicated or triplicated, there’s a high likelihood that it is a double or triple post.
Mainly, though, what I’m asking for here is how ought we to feel about it? Ought we to be ashamed? Ought we to assume that everyone is saying, “what a jackass”? Has the point that we were making in our post been compromised, even though the doubling or tripling was no fault of our own?
I think that’s the safest assumption at the SDMB. But that doesn’t mean you should fall into a slough of despond. Keep a stiff upper lip and don’t look back.
I once talked with a moderator about this, and he said his peeve about “Oops, I double-posted” posts is when people include addendums to their point in the “Oops” post. Doing so creates a problem-- the moderator who comes by to clean up the double post can’t delete the “Oops” post, as it elaborates on a point, but he can’t just leave it there, as it refers to a double-posting that no longer exists.
The mod’s only option is to edit the post’s content so the double-posting reference is gone but the remainder remains. Meanwhile, there are fifty bajillion other threads to moderate, which may include more double-posts that need to be cleaned up. I think we can agree that a mod’s time is better spent on reviewing a queue of threads than fixing a single post.
So (IMO, of course) the best thing to do when you multiple-post is to not apologize for doing so. If you feel you must, try not to add anything to your point in that post. If there is something you want to add, you should do so in another post, post-count-padding appearance be damned.
Also-- you don’t have to reload the everything to check if your post went through. Find the Reply page (or wherever you typed your post) and hit Preview. You’ll be shown the updated thread, and if your post went through, it will appear at the top of the Topic Review.
I sometimes change my second “double” post – I’m sitting there with nothing to do waiting for the SDMB server to respond, and naturally enough, I’m still thinking about the last thing I wrote. So something else will occur to write, particularly, I’ve found, imagining what one of the other posters will respond.
So, to satisfy moderators and posters, would it be okay to change the second of “double posts” if they: 1) Don’t make reference to a possible earlier double post, and 2) Include all the original text as well as the additions?
I’ve noticed that too, partly - that is, I’ll see two posts that look almost the same, except that the person’s either added a sentence or (more frequently) changed a typo or fixed a link. It’s kind of like editing your own post, except you’re just adding a post…
I think you’re better off just saying “Just to clarify/expand on my point about the blah blah blah” instead of having the same post with modifications. Speaking for myself, when there are double posts (or what appear to be double posts), I tend to assume they’re duplicates and ignore the second one. If others are like me, it’s very likely that a lot of posters will miss your changes.
Also, if you just dive right into your addendum, it saves posters time, as they only have to read your changes. If you repost the entire original post with your corrections, they have to read your whole post over again and simultaneously keep an eye out for the differences between the second one and the first one. Of course, they’ll only do so if they’re aware your second post has been changed-- to go back to my first point, they may just assume it’s a duplicate and ignore the corrected post altogether.
In this case, though, it’s not the kind double-posts that we’ve so far been talking about. So far it’s been the inadvertent multiple posts; yours is a more deliberate “double posting” (as I think you know, as you’ve also put the term in quotation marks). Not to say that you don’t have a valid question or point or anything… I just wanted to clarify that.
Like AudreyK said, if you think it’s necessary to correct a mistake, then just make the correction (“Oops, the correct link is _____”, or whatever). Also note that a great many mistakes don’t really need correction. Spelling mistakes, for instance: You don’t want to make them deliberately, of course, but in most cases one or two spelling mistakes won’t make your post incomprehensible (if it would, of course, then post a correction). And you certainly shouldn’t have a string of six posts in a row, to correct misspellings in your previous spelling-correction posts.
But that doesn’t mean you should fall into a slough of despond. Keep a stiff upper lip and don’t look back.
