Duplicate comments

[sam]

Hi I got the below message from Mike. Paul could you take a look if you have a minute?

Thanks

Sam

I am noticing that many of the comments are being duplicated quite often - sometimes once and Rob's last comments was added twice. I've been deleting them but will be offline from now over the weekend.

This article is getting lots of comments
​https://www.transitionnetwork.org/blogs/rob-hopkins/2014-02/open-letter-bbc-lord-lawsons-today-programme-appearance

[sam]

Mike has been deleting the duplicates. I'll leave a couple up if any more come in so we have something to look at.

Thanks

Sam

[paul]

I may be wrong but I think there is a problem with Drupal 6 core that allows you to submit the same post multiple times by just repeatedly clicking on the submit button. If this is right then you may be seeing multiple comments as a result of high activity on the site: the user is waiting for a page that is not loading quickly enough so presses submit again, ..

[sam]

Thanks Paul, certainly seems to be a possibility.

More from Mike here:

it's one of those horrid intermittent problems. I have seen it a while ago.
And it doesn't seem to happen every time. I've commented again just now and it didn't do but my previous comment did.
Only thought I have is that I think i ticked the 'Do not send updates for this comment' box the time when it didn't repeat. A suggestion only at this stage.

I'll ask Mike to confirm he only pressed the button once.

Thanks

Sam

[sam]

Mike has confirmed he only pressed once.

He has also left up some duplicates here:

here is an example of a comment being duplicated (4 times in this case)
​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/blogs/rob-hopkins/2014-02/open-letter-bbc-lord-lawsons-today-programme-appearance#comment-17116

In case that helps.

Thanks

Sam

[paul]

Can I get clearance to turn on and configure syslog? We can then have a look through the log file the next time this problem occurs? Does anyone know what the load on the server was like at the time the above problem occurred [ 25 February 2014 - 1:13pm]?

[paul]

There is no perfect solution as this is a problem within drupal core. The conceptual issue here seems to be that the form_build_id changes throughout the lifetime of the form. I haven't looked into the problem any deeper, as it must be a difficult problem, since it also exists in drupal 7, and is also not fixed in drupal 8.

The partial solution is to hide the submit button after a form submit with some javascript, which should prevent the problem in javascript enabled browsers, which is probably everyone. We should be able to do this with the "Hide submit button" module. Shall I review this module on my local server?

Hide submit button
​https://drupal.org/project/hide_submit