Not showing duplicate entries on reading page

[lapillus]

Title:
Not showing duplicate entries on reading page

Area:
entries

Summary:
Make an easily togglable setting so that identical entries that are posted to multiple journals only show up once on a given users reading page.

Description:
I'd love a toggle, either on the reading page itself (easier to switch on and off on the fly) or as a reading filter (wouldn't require tweaking layouts to the way adding a toggle on the reading page would.)

What it's there to solve? Same post showing up five times in a row on a reading page.

Why it's the best? It may not be but they're the only ones I've come up with readily. Doing it on the reading page makes it readily accessible with all the associated advantages and drawbacks. Doing it as a filter makes it invisible (which may cause unnecessary panics) but also, I suspect makes it much less likely to be used or to restrict to a given level of user.

Problems? Possibly prohibitive CPU usage if direct comparison require. Probably not possible to implement except with entries that are identical except for posting location - might not work for comms that require different titling conventions, for instance. Someone might have forgotten they have it on and panic when they don't see a post in all the places they posted it resulting in calls for help.

Poll #1269 Not showing duplicate entries on reading page

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 32

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
3 (9.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (3.1%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
13 (40.6%)

(I have no opinion)
13 (40.6%)

(Other: please comment)
2 (6.2%)

Comments

[zvi]

It would be good if someone could figure out a not crazy way to do it. Also, a way to indicate there's conversation in multiple places, if comments are left open.

I have my doubts that it's possible unless we first automate posting to multiple comms simultaneously, and that I am against.

[cesy]

Yes, this.

[snakeling]

I'm for automating posting to multiple comms simultaneously, with a very low maximum number of comms, say 3 or 5. And it should be implemented at the same time as "show crossposted entries only once on the reading page".

[aedifica]

I personally probably wouldn't use it because the comments would be different--for example, over on LJ I'm on two different bicycling communities and people often cross-post but I do look at both entries because different people comment on each one. (It's a nuisance, but there it is.) This isn't a vote against the idea, though.

[pseudomonas]

Likewise. Ditto for inter-site crossposts where there's a set of comments on DW and another set on, say, LJ. Some sort of per-entry metadata saying "the canonical URI for this content is X" might do it, but it could get very kludgy very fast.

[inarticulate]

What people have already brought up, along with the question-- how would the filter decide which of the entries to display?

[triadruid]

Don't like it. I suspect this is looking bad right now because DW is still in the growing pains, so duplicative communities are probably more common now than on a 'mature' site like LJ.

[lapillus]

Actually the opposite is the case, at least when it comes to my reading. The majority of communities I belong to are fanfiction ones and once a fandom matures there tends to be multiplication of related communities and with it a multiplication of crossposting between them. The reason I suggested it is that I'm tired of getting five copies in a row of posts announcing the same story which is posted on the author's own journal with comments collected there. This hasn't been a problem on DW so far but is definitely a problem for me on LJ currently (there were three such stories just this morning). I don't think it's the sort of feature that would be of use to everyone, but for certain modes of use it would be very handy.

[mneme]

Hmm. Actually, the Right Way to do this would be to implement cross-journal crossposting in the core -- and have crossposted posts be -real- crossposting, with only one actual post and multiple references to it.

That way, the comment duplication problem wouldn't be a problem (you'd have to have individual copies be links, so removing them wouldn't remove the post anywhere else unless it was removed from -all- locations). But I think security would make this unfeasable.

Other than that -- I could see making a Smart Style that detected duplicate posts in a row and collapsed them with the alternative links running side by side; you'd have to have posts contain hints that let a style do this, but it wouldn't be a radical change.