Lots of duplicate questions from new users

trainman419 commented 9 years ago

When moderating, I see a lot of duplicate questions from new users.

This suggests that we have a user experience problem with the site - for some reason, new users don't understand that their question has been submitted, and they submit it a second time.

We saw this even before we turned the moderation on, so I suspect it's related to the question submission UI, and not the moderation features.

130s commented 9 years ago

I just noticed there's a merge option. Somewhat helpful.

gavanderhoorn commented 7 years ago

Bumping this, as it's still an issue. I remove multiple duplicate questions per day.

gavanderhoorn commented 7 years ago

And another bump: this is getting really annoying. I daily close and delete something like 10 duplicates now.

Apparently new members start writing a new question without registering, which after they click "Login/Signup to Post" then takes them to the registration screen. After that is finished, they can continue to actually post the question, but apparently that leads to the question being doubleposted (or even tripleposted).

Moderation doesn't help, but as @trainman419 already mentioned, it might be that the submission/registration process has a hickup somewhere.

gavanderhoorn commented 7 years ago

Repeating myself a little here, but this is still rather an issue. First thing I do almost daily is close & delete a nr of duplicates, typically posted by new users (but not exclusively).

gavanderhoorn commented 6 years ago

This is starting to get old (so this is my last comment here), but the duplicates situation is getting ridiculous. I deleted 8 again today.

It's been a while since I've posted a question to ROS Answers that had to go through moderation, but can we get some (static) overlay for new users that have not yet been through the moderation queue? The overlay could tell them that they're not seeing their question because it's currently being held up in the moderation queue.

I seem to remember Gazebo's AskBot instance does that, but the notice is tiny. Please make it bold font, 32 pts or something.

gavanderhoorn commented 6 years ago

I know I promised to stop commenting here in my previous comment, but the nr of duplicates is reaching new levels again.

I'm also getting kinda disappointed here as well: what is the point in reporting issues here if they are never acted upon? Seeing as the "you're question is being held for moderation"-notice is already part of askbot, updating it to make it more noticable should not be too much work.

Does @evgenyfadeev still provide support for the OR instance of AskBot?

130s commented 6 years ago

On a related note, I just realized that I've been contributing to have duplicates passing, by approving new accounts and all the associated posts, instead of cherry-picking each post made by those accounts. Perhaps moderators selectively trim duplicates on the Moderator's view before approving accounts and posts makes things much cleaner practically.

gavanderhoorn commented 6 years ago

That seems a bit like a work-around: posting duplicates should just not happen this often. Whether or not the moderation interface has UI that makes dealing with duplicates easier is orthogonal imho.

evgenyfadeev commented 6 years ago

@gavanderhoorn did you notice new users posting the same content repeatedly? If this happens due to some confusion, something can be done in the UI to improve in this area.

Perhaps we could force new users to search before posting - since your site already has a lot of content it should be OK, what do you guys think?

gavanderhoorn commented 6 years ago

@evgenyfadeev wrote:

did you notice new users posting the same content repeatedly?

yes. I have had to delete 5 questions today which were duplicates.

If this happens due to some confusion, something can be done in the UI to improve in this area.

I guess the confusion comes from the fact that new users don't notice that their questions are still held-up in the moderation queue. See https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/answers.ros.org/issues/107#issuecomment-376599861.

evgenyfadeev commented 6 years ago

gavanderhoorn commented 6 years ago

@evgenyfadeev: any updates?

gavanderhoorn commented 4 years ago

And another datapoint: closed about 20 duplicate posts this week alone again.

@evgenyfadeev: is there any chance this will get fixed?

Or are we giving up on AskBot/ROS Answers?

evgenyfadeev commented 4 years ago

Hi @gavanderhoorn, there will be updates soon, although not related to this issue.

Not sure how to stop people to from asking duplicate questions, unless they are exact duplicates of previously asked questions or there is a reliable detection of approximate duplicates.

gavanderhoorn commented 4 years ago

It's not people posting duplicate questions (as in: different users).

It's duplicates of posts by the same user.

So 3 times the same question, while the user apparently/reportedly has only posted it once.

This is especially the case with new users, but also happens with users that have already been through the moderation queue.

ros-infrastructure / answers.ros.org

Lots of duplicate questions from new users #107