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This question is a verbatim duplicate of that question. They had the same title and body (until one of them was edited), are by the same author, and appear to have been posted within the same second, i.e., both are shown as having been posted at 15:32:17Z. My belief that that one was the original is motivated only by the post IDs: 1028834 vs. 1028835.

It seems spectacularly unlikely that the author (or anyone) intended for this to happen. My guess is that the author either clicked the Post Question button twice in quick succession by accident, or some technical problem caused it to be posted twice at almost the same time.

Doesn't the Stack Exchange system try to prevent that from happening, though? My understanding was that, besides the usual rate-limiting, the system tries to prevent this sort of thing by insisting that a question not be too similar, in some respects, to a question that already exists, such as by insisting that the title be at least slightly different.

Even if I'm mistaken to think that the system is designed to prevent this, it still seems like a bug that it would allow exactly identical posts within such a short time. I'm not even really sure this was triggered by anything on the author's end; perhaps it is a database bug.

For reference, here are the timelines:

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    I'd think crappy network connection so post requests went in multiple times and the client side JavaScript block got ignored - the block is primarily client side, I think...
    – muru
    Apr 27, 2018 at 18:00
  • Wow! Eagle-eye!
    – Fabby
    Apr 27, 2018 at 20:54

1 Answer 1

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There is a system in place to prevent exact duplicates. There's also a system in place to prevent the same user from posting too quickly.

Unfortunately, these only work if one of the questions exists first; these appear to have been created simultaneously.

That's... a pretty good trick.

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