Making this thread because I notice harsh behaviour on duplicate threads. They get locked and hidden almost immediately. So I thought I would make this thread suggesting to go a little easier on people who make a duplicate thread. I do agree that the search function should be used to see if a thread like the one you want to make already exists. But simply telling someone to use the search feature isn’t helpful on its own.
The search may fail and result in a duplicate thread being made because:
User doesn’t know the terminology to use
Their searches are too general
Their searches are too specific
If they ask for something too common, like “how do I prevent exploiters” then sure it should be closed. Terminologies or specific/general searches won’t be a problem at all you don’t need them.
“Duplicate threads” sound like someone posting their own posts over and over again. But yea… they don’t really treat them harshly. If there’s a topic about it, people get redirected to the main posts to continue the discussion there (not to mention that they usually move their entire post to the thread they redirect you to). I do suggest tho that we could have the FAQ (yes we do have a FAQ) more visible and updated.
Locking and unlisting is the only reasonable, productive action. Otherwise, useful information is effectively split amongst several threads, meaning anyone who has this problem in the future will either have to look for several threads on the exact same topic, or find one inaccurate one and be misinformed.
Generally, if there is an explicit canonical duplicate thread we try to include a link to it in the lock/unlist message, or we just merge the duplicate topic into it. If it hasn’t been included, most likely the topic is a broad blanket topic brought up hundreds of times before; finding an answer via search is trivial.
I agree with you on this, but some people do this on purpose in order to up their post count, also if you don’t punish them, they are more likely to make the same mistake again and be more careless about it.