"The URL you are about to post was found in 1 other post(s)." (2000)

May 16, 2000 4:04 PM

I'd like it if, when you're previewing a topic you're about to post, metafilter says something like:

The URL you are about to post was found in 1 other post(s).

lorem ipsum sit amet..
Go to the detail view for this result

please check the thread(s) above to make sure you're not duplicating a previous post.


posted by muta to Feature Requests at 4:04 PM (3 comments total)

great idea!
posted by TuxHeDoh at 10:14 AM on May 17, 2000

Not a bad idea, but for that to happen(easily) every link in every post would have to be sorted into its own column in the DB. I don't think this is happening right now.

To do it otherwise(difficult) would require that CF parse any string within <a> tags and try to match that against all text of all posts.. A SQL statement like that is very difficult to do in a timely manner...

A good idea though, but I don't see any easier ways to do something like that :)
posted by djc at 10:59 AM on May 18, 2000

It's easy to do this on the top link posted, I could just do a search in the db for that url string, but in the text would be a bit more problematic and I bet would come up with tons of false positives (imagine if amazon.com was searched and you were warned every time you had that buried in a big post about something else).

I'll be adding this soon. It's not that hard to search on the Link URL, and having something there is better than nothing.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:31 AM on May 19, 2000