When I browse the Forum to search for tutorials, invest in a conversation about a topic, or give constructive advice, I often see posts that ask questions which have already been asked or addressed. The biggest category I see with this issue is #development-discussion, which often repeats the same “what did you do during 2020” sort of nonsense.
To combat these annoyances, I believe a new type of ‘flagging’ category should be added. Currently the closest I can get to flagging these posts are flagging them for being off topic, but if we added a flag system for being mentioned before then we can stay true to the actual reason for flagging it.
This doesn’t just apply to #development-discussion, this of course could be used in ANY category, as long as the topic was already mentioned and you have found that the post was already mentioned.
The reduction of clutter is a necessity, as more and more people come flooding in. The best thing we can do to prevent duplication of posts, is to create a way to target them specifically for being a duplication.
I close my argument by stating this: If we all stop posting duplications of questions, and simply search before we post, the forum could be so less messy to maneuver around! Thank you for your time, ladies and gentlemen.
Support! It’s getting old having to always right out that the post is a duplicate. The only problem I see is how would we send the correct topic so DET knows it’s a duplicate.
For now, you may flag those threads as off-topic or choose “Something else” and then link the first post about that issue. I do not belive that this page can be customised directly through the Discourse settings, though.
Actually I believe it is a Discourse feature to allow “server” managers to add or subtract flagging options, or at least it is from the researching on the subject that I’ve done
I like it, it’d definitely help with repeated discussions. There could be a box that appears for you to put the original topic that the post repeated, for when this flag is used.
You should be using the Something Else option to flag these kinds of threads so that you can use the message box to link to an older or more discussion-filled thread. A new flag category is not descriptive enough to point moderation towards a better thread of the same topic.
I fully support this. You could argue that this should be flagged under spam or the something else option, but I don’t think that’s clear enough to newer members when flagging for this reason.
A lot of the time I see some extremely generic questions like ‘how do I start building?’ which have been asked at least 5 times before. Because it’s such a common occurrence, I think this issue is in fact worthy of its own flag.
