The poor design of the groups/forums and Thing comments in the website leads to a high risk of people posting the same thing multiple times. There is no obvious UI feedback when trying to submit a new forum post, nor is there any provision to prevent submitting the same thing twice. Combined with the terrible unreliability of the web servers (#2), this results in practically every new forum post being submitted multiple times, because people will think the submission has failed and click the submit button again and again.
This is extremely annoying especially in combination with the other issue of not being able to browse beyond the first page (#6).
Possible solution (should be implemented for all forum/comment interfaces):
First of all, when someone clicks the submit button, the button must be greyed out and disabled, showing a busy indicator as long as the AJAX request is ongoing. Only if the request times out, re-enable the button. This is not sufficient though because the request may have succeeded and only the response may have failed. Therefore:
Also assign a unique token when the user opens the ‘new post’ page. If a post with the same token as a recently submitted one is submitted again, replace the older post with the new content instead of making a new one.
The poor design of the groups/forums and Thing comments in the website leads to a high risk of people posting the same thing multiple times. There is no obvious UI feedback when trying to submit a new forum post, nor is there any provision to prevent submitting the same thing twice. Combined with the terrible unreliability of the web servers (#2), this results in practically every new forum post being submitted multiple times, because people will think the submission has failed and click the submit button again and again.
This is extremely annoying especially in combination with the other issue of not being able to browse beyond the first page (#6).
Possible solution (should be implemented for all forum/comment interfaces):