Recently, I've been getting the occasional duplicated comment. I thought this had something to do with the comments being held in moderation, but, as Brian explains, it appears to be because of an error.
Thanks Brian.
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(Now that I look at the title, that sounds like an incredibly tepid harness-team command. "On, Moderation! Forward, with prudent speed!" I could clear that up by adding "Comment" in the middle, but I kind of like the image...)
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No, very possibly the issue is not that the comments don't appear immediately. For moderated SciBlogs such as this one, when things are working correctly, what happens when a comment is submitted is a page appears saying comments are moderated and the just-submitted comment is being held for approval. I have a hard time imaging anyone misunderstanding what is happening.
What is happening--and this has been going on for at least the past week--is the SciBlogs server says an error occurred (with no further details). As a natural result, people try to submit the comment again. This can happen multiple times. Eventually, either no error occurs or the poster gives up.
However, it seems that there never was an actual error! The comment did get through, and either made it to the blog (when not moderated), or, when moderated, into the queue waiting approval. Hence, the blog/queue gets multiple copies of the same comment, one for each time the commenter/reader tries to submit.
Suggestion: SciBlogs should have a blog(?) about technical issues and suggested improvements to SciBlogs. The staff can explain what is going on, and the readers can offer observations, hints, suggestions, and report problems.
I know readers can, supposedly, report problems via e-mail, but whenever I've done this, I've never gotten any feedback. Hence, I've no clear idea if the e-mail is being read, or if it is, if there's any plans or actions to evaluate or otherwise deal with the issues.
Here's the page which is displayed when there is not an error for a moderated blog:
The last line ("Return ...") is a hyperlink which does what it says it does.
As per my previous comment (which resulted in the above-quoted page when I submitted it), I've a very hard time imaging anyone misunderstanding the above?
How close together in time are your multiple comments? If fairly close in time, then I'll guess it's the ongoing(?) SciBlogs problems; if not, then perhaps some people are forgetting that the comment was submitted? Or think it was lost or something?
I can't check how far apart the duplicates are because I've deleted them.
I suspect you're right, and I've edited the original post to link to your first comment.
The problems might have something to do with an increase in the number of comments because of the 500,000th comment competition.
Thanks Brian.
I haven't gotten any error messages or submitted a comment more than once. If I'm showing up with duplicate comments, it has to be something wrong on the SciBlogs.
FWIW, this "error" occurs periodically on various SB blogs. Whether it just goes away, or whether they catch it and fix it, I don't know, since they don't answer emails much (ever?), but it's not new.