The fact that I was able to only submit one makes me think the most likely cause is people being impatient and hitting submit multiple times, which would then trigger the forum to create duplicates of the topic.

It takes about a second on my end to submit a topic, half that for a reply. If your internet is slow or whatever it probably takes 4 or 5. I kinda understand why some people might think the page has gone unresponsive or something if they're in that situation.

Carter can correct me, but I believe his explanation was that it happens whenever the forum goes to modify a large table...Of which, the forum topics and posts probably counts. It was also why the search was slow, as the search modifies the table of searches...In other words, our box sucks.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the search thing because somehow I forgot that was a thing.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like part of the duplicate topics problem has to do with random errors on the web site. I've never had it happen to me personally, but given the amount of issues this site has had and continues to have, I wouldn't be so quick to put all the blame on users for being impatient. Not without logs or other diagnostic data to see what's actually going on.

I would just like a definitive explanation for the duplicated topics. I was just able to open all three of one setwithout issues. Are they being generated by the forum in response to one press of the submit button, which suggests something ridiculously broken? Are they caused by people not understanding how form submissions work and hitting the button several times in quick succession?

I'm just confused because if it were the former I would expect every single submitted topic to be duplicated.

I am almost certain it has to do with people being impatient. I can post topics just fine without it duplicating, and to be honest, topic submission is not that slow for me.

I'd think there would be something that they could add that would give you an error if you hit submit more than once, or wouldn't let you post a topic if another thread with the exact same title already exists. But then again, maybe there's just no way to stop it or slow it down. I just know that it is disturbing to see the same thing posted 2, 3, 4, 5 or more times in a row, or several clusters of 2 or 3 of them sprinkled all throughout the list of new posts.

@18, that would help, but then you might probably want to make it so the forum doesn't rely on entirely separate page loads for everything. And at that point you might as well just switch to discourse because there really isn't much of a point making the software more like it when it already exists.

Yupp, that's 2 and a half pages of the same topic.

I don't even know how something like that could have happened unless someone mashed the submit button acrap ton of times.