On Reddit, sometimes I'd try to submit a comment and on my end it looked like it didn't send. So I hit the button again to submit. And then upon reload (maybe when I come back later to read replies) I find there were two duplicate comments created. Then I have to go delete the duplicate. (I'd also see this happen to other people, in which case I upvoted their reply with the most upvotes and downvoted its duplicate.)

Same thing happened today on PieFed. Tried to submit a comment. Thought it didn't send. So I hit the button again to submit. Very pleased that I did not end up being allowed to make that duplicate comment (thereby letting me know the first did get through). It's also probably helpful for preventing intentional spam ;)

Yeah, this is a great feature.

Yeah, this is a great feature.

Thanks devs!

Gotta love all the awesome features on PieFed!

By the way, this is a trivial problem to correct. If it wasn't, you'd always be worried about accidentally ordering the same thing twice from online retailers. There are libraries you can use.

I don't know the typical method that retailers use, but if you were implementing the functionality yourself, one way that would be easy to implement would be that when you start making a reply, the client creates a unique ID, which is sent as data alongside the actual comment. Each time you submit a comment, the server simply checks to see if your user already submitted a comment with the same ID.

This solves all problems as long as you don't have a badly implemented client. The fact that you can accidentally submit the same comment multiple times on Reddit is nothing but pathetic on Reddit's side. I can understand something like this from a volunteer project, but Reddit is an actual for-profit company.

It is sometimes shockingly-polished software. I used to make duplicate replies on Reddit all the time.

By the way, this is a trivial problem to correct.

No. It isn't.

It is a hard problem to solve. Tom Scott made a video on it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IP-rGJKSZ3s

That's a video. If it was a list of bullet points, I might have gone through it, but I'm not going to watch an introductory video about idempotence, a subject that I almost certainly know more about than the presenter, to try to invent an argument for you.

If you want to discuss this subject, please either refer to the points I made, or bring up the points from the video yourself.

The video makes the same point as the commenter you're replying to.

To add something to discussion, I think there can be a wishlist UX issue. If there's a duplicate post being made, the back end should return a link to it along with the error, and the front end should redirect the user to the post instead of showing the error. I think that's friendlier experience than a "Duplicate reply" error message. I also know that I'd be too lazy to implement that UX branch myself in my project because of how rarely that happens (:

You're welcome :)

If only piefed could get rid of this kind of comment as well

You can use the existing options piefed already gives you to achieve a similar result. You just go to the profile page, tap the "more" dropdown, and then hit "block". I'm just about to use that functionality to get rid of the comment I'm currently replying to, as well as a bunch of inevitably similar comments. Hope this helps.

Ha, you got me

Ha, you got me