Prevent duplicate forum posts when double-clicking

[François Marier]

Some people seem to submit their posts twice when they post something to the forums. My guess is that they accidentally double-click the submit button.

We should be able to detect this and prevent the double posts either server-side (ideally) or at the very least in Javascript directly in the browser.

[Ruslan Kabalin (rkabalin)]

Did not manage to replicate, even if you click the Post button multiple times, only one post is submitted.

[Andrew Nicols (dobedobedoh)]

Also unable to replicate this bug with Javascript turned on.

[Andrew Nicols (dobedobedoh)]

If I disable javascript, I can hit the Post button multiple times. Javascript already exists to prevent this.

So we're instead looking at a server side alternative.
We could try selecting any forum posts with the same poster, subject and body posted within a reasonable time frame (1 second will probably suffice). If they exist, don't add the new post.

However, this does seem a little ungraceful. Should we, for example, offer any error message?

[Andrew Nicols (dobedobedoh)]

Suggest moving the target for this to 1.3.1

[Hugh Davenport (hugh-davenport)]

I can confirm this is still an issue on master with javascript disabled

[Hugh Davenport (hugh-davenport)]

https://reviews.mahara.org/867

[Hugh Davenport (hugh-davenport)]

This approach checks whether the same content was posted less than 5 seconds ago. The user could still "spam" the submit button for longer than 5 seconds to get a double post, and again after another 5 seconds etc...

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Reviewed: https://reviews.mahara.org/867
Committed: http://gitorious.org/mahara/mahara/commit/4ed6f2a0daff09ff3780c91509f7b67b787ca580
Submitter: Francois Marier (<email address hidden>)
Branch: master

commit 4ed6f2a0daff09ff3780c91509f7b67b787ca580
Author: Hugh Davenport <email address hidden>
Date: Thu Nov 17 10:44:31 2011 +1300

    Stop accidental double posting in forums

    Bug #568140

    This problem only occurs when Javascript is disabled.
    This is one possible fix, which doesn't require changes to
    the database schema.

    Change-Id: I434a2806010acd9848622032258fca84e91e5b16
    Signed-off-by: Hugh Davenport <email address hidden>