4 ms·
YC: There should be a way to prevent reposts
Recently, I've noticed a lot of articles that are reposts of the same thing. They should all be consolidated to one thread. Just my opinion.
- jmtulloss 19y agoI agree. I've also noticed that the same story as reported by two different news sources will get posted, which is essentially the same thing. Google does some pretty cool probability stuff (at least, I think that's how they do it) to figure out what articles are the same for news.google.com. Something like that would be really cool on new.yc. I know, the source is open.... but I'm clearly busy ;)
- aneesh 19y agoYeah, I've wondered, how exactly does Google do that?? Anyway, in the short term, a manual system would probably be more accurate.
- tlrobinson 19y agoThere is. Duplicate URLs are not allowed. As for different sources reporting on the same thing, that's a bit harder.
- bootload 19y ago"... There is. Duplicate URLs are not allowed. ..." There is a subtler variation on this. Two different urls resolving to the same article. A site may publish: - http://foo.com/date/bar/some-inane-tech-article http://foo.com/date/bar/some-inane-tech-article - http://foo.com/date/some-inane-tech-article http://foo.com/date/some-inane-tech-article Both urls point to the same article, both are unique but point to the same document. A quick example might be an article and the same article printed.
- bootload 19y ago"... There is. Duplicate URLs are not allowed ... There is a subtler variation on this. Two different urls resolving to the same article ..." Here is an live example I just spotted: original ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html ~ post ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133430 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133430 dupe ~ http://paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html http://paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html ~ post ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134775 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134775
- bootload 19y agoand another: - http://thoughtpad.net/alan-dean/http-headers-status.png http://thoughtpad.net/alan-dean/http-headers-status.png, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134933 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134933 - http://thoughtpad.net/alan-dean/http-headers-status.gif http://thoughtpad.net/alan-dean/http-headers-status.gif, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134236 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134236
- aneesh 19y agoThere could simply be a "report duplicate" link (where you specify which article it's a repost of) next to a new post for the first 1 hour after it's posted. If enough people say it's a duplicate of a particular article, then it goes off, and the comment threads are merged.
- tim2 19y agoInstead of dropping or merging the article, put a list (or link to a list) of "previous postings" somewhere very prominently on the page.
- kajecounterhack 19y agoCan something be written that strips the url of arbirary variables? http://foo.com/bar?aritrary-var=arbitrary-val http://foo.com/bar?aritrary-var=arbitrary-val to just http://foo.com/bar http://foo.com/bar that would help because a lot of people end up posting links with ?source=newsletter or &sessionid=asdf1234ilikepie or etc
- natrius 19y agoThose variables are occasionally meaningful. Stripping them all off indiscriminantly would break some links.
- marcus 19y agoSo don't strip them indiscriminately, have the HN site compare submitted pages it gets by dropping them one by one to the original link, only maintain those that actually affect the resulting page.
- mixmax 19y agoWhat about: http://economist.com/articles?somearticle http://economist.com/articles?somearticle and http://economist.com/articles?entirelydifferentarticle http://economist.com/articles?entirelydifferentarticle
- nreece 19y agoThere should be a better way to prevent reposts
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]