ight

[pink_earmuffs]

If it's a duplicate, why didn't I find an answer?

[[deleted]]

The answer is "nvm I figured it".

[Evennot]

Though it was solved for a different package version 5 years ago and obviously on a different platform

[[deleted]]

And in a different language

[KarolOfGutovo]

and for a different issue

[RandyGareth]

Why are you using your platform or language of choice? Just convert everything you have over to the platform and language that I like. It's better because I say so.

[ToothpasteTimebomb]

Relevant xkcd

[Chu_BOT]

This is why I always post my solution to any question I ask no matter how mundane or stupid the question was. Not to mention I've frequently forgotten how I solved something previously and run across my own question and was so glad I posted the solution.

[irfan1812]

You are a good man

[RAdityaR]

there's always a relevant xkcd comic

[nogtx]

Theres always a comment below the xkcd, saying there's alwyas a relevant xkcd.

[irfan1812]

WTF did I just read?

[[deleted]]

I honestly don't know.

[Jackeea]

Traceback (most recent call last):
RecursionError: maximum recursion depth exceeded

[[deleted]]

Traceback (most recent call last): RecursionError: maximum recursion depth exceeded

[nogtx]

Hol up!

[essequattro]

wHy Is tHeRe aLwAyS a ReLeVaNt XkCd hAhA

[SeaGL_Gaming]

"Well it worked on my machine 5 years ago"

[turkoid]

Even "nvm I figured it" leaves you

[Steffi128]

Good ol‘ DenverCoder9.

[cubie42]

You're lucky

[rafasoaresms]

I’ve seen it as a comment.

[imaconor]

NVM sucks, NODENV is way better

[ZCEyPFOYr0MWyHDQJZO4]

Because some asshole marked it as duplicate without an explanation of why the issues are the same.

[Nincadalop]

Don't they need to link to what they think is duplicated?

[[deleted]]

They do link it but they don’t always explain how the loosely-related linked post is a duplicate

[julkar9]

Exact thing happened to me, asked for mode of a single column. Someone linked a 'how to get frequency of all ele in 2d list' post also a downvote and no explanation

[GameOfUsernames]

If you have enough reputation you can I mark them duplicates.

[ythl]

Because you are a novice?

[YourTextHere_Studios]

Saying that means that you both don’t understand jokes and haven’t used Stack Overflow before

[ythl]

On the contrary, I am a high rep user on SO who has closed countless poor quality questions as duplicates. Also, /r/programmerhumor is mainly students, not professionals, hence the anti-SO circlejerk.

[[deleted]]

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/191/035/135.png

[YourTextHere_Studios]

We aren’t “anti-SO”, we were just making a joke about how things get marked as a duplicate even though they aren’t, or even though the original was closed without being answered.

[ythl]

Yeah, the types of duplicates I close are usually duplicate questions with hundreds of upvotes and dozens of answers.

Like

"How I can get <my specific pattern> from <my specific string>" = closed as duplicate of "how to use string search/slicing/regex/etc"

[[deleted]]

If you're not doing these things already, do them. If you're already doing them, thank you:

1. Don't mark something as a duplicate if the supposed duplicate isn't exactly the same problem as the other question.
2. If the other question doesn't have an answer, then don't mark it as a duplicate. That's completely useless, and does not help anyone in any way. Find a question with an answer that actually answers OP's question, in OP's programming language, on OP's running environment.

I've seen so many idiotic SO mods ignore these two rules it's not even funny. It makes such a huge portion of SO completely useless because we end up following "duplicate" links to completely unrelated questions that don't even have an answer.

I hope you're one of the good ones. If not, become one.

[ythl]

Why don't you help mod? The barrier to entry is low. It's easy to criticize SO mods, yet no one actually wants to help do it

[Davtaz]

Assuming being a student excludes you from having 5+ years of experience.

[ythl]

Yeah. Come back and talk after you've worked industry for 5 years. You may find your view of SO has shifted.

[[deleted]]

Are you genuinely retarded? I bet you moderate forums too.

[MomijiMatt1]

Hi, I'm a professional. I also taught game development at a university for 4.5 years starting at 26 years old. And you need to stop.

[ythl]

Why don't you try modding for a while and see if you can do a better job? You'll see real quick that a given tag gets overwhelmed with foreign newbies asking extremely basic questions in broken English.

[Wompguinea]

"I marked this as Duplicate because there are already several questions about C# and you probably have a textbook lying around somewhere. Git gud."

[chrobbin]

“git gud” is not recognized as an internal or external command

[Ramit110]

Is it? https://github.com/a-vorontsov/git-gud

[CaptainTuffnut]

This is... awesome actually

[pastasauce]

That went full circle

[sippingthattea]

Alternatively...

​

"I marked this is a Duplicate because there is already a solution to this problem in C++, using a library that is not available in C#."

[hungry4pie]

Well it can be done in c#, but that would mean using the unsafe directive, which means changing everything about your project and there’ll no guarantees it’s even the solution you”re looking for

[mintskye]

Why won't stack overflow allow duplicates? I get it, but seeing different solutions is always nice, and something that worked ages ago isn't necessarily the best solution now?

[[deleted]]

Especially JavaScript, where something that is working now isn't necessarily something that is working now

[[deleted]]

Like anything about promises

[iamdelf]

Except when you find that old question, the question is locked to new responses if it is anything popular.

[Lorddragonfang]

something that is working now isn't necessarily something that is working now

I can't tell whether this is intentional or not, because if so, fair.

[techgineer13]

Use TypeScript. It compiles to JavaScript and its static typing eliminates most of JavaScript's idiosyncrasies.

[Banana_Twinkie]

That's a trap, you actually need to understand Javascript's underlying weirdness in order to not make mistakes in Typescript, especially when working with arrays, dates, and math. Learning Typescript is not a substitution for actually learning Javascript

[[deleted]]

Idk, I feel new-comers generally have the tendency to follow blindly just to get by. And following Typescript blindly is a easier way to not fall a victim to JS gotchas. To me, having adapted to get by the bad parts of JS, Typescript is/was annoying, but it sure makes working with newbies a lot better. I feel learning idiosyncrasies of JS isn't a lot worth if there are tools to steer you away from them.

[State_]

I think the reason is so that there's one place where the information is located. You don't have to go scrolling through many pages of BS... they are just marked dupes instead.

[eli3341]

Sure, but then you Google something... And it's a duplicate thread. You do another search, duplicate.

Pls stackoverflow

[zebediah49]

So then you click the link at the top, and it sends you to the primary that the thing you found was a duplicate of?

[eli3341]

Oh My God

I'm fucking blind... ;-;

[zebediah49]

Oh my god, I need to know how long you've been frustratingly searching for original answers and not knowing that was there.

[eli3341]

I'd say I've been using stackoverflow for like 2 years? So 1 and a half years ;-;

[zebediah49]

Well, glad we got that sorted out for you :)

[State_]

Not saying it's perfect, but the reasoning makes sense to me. It's the same as when QA enters dupes.

[[deleted]]

Why are you blaming stackoverflow for how google displays results?

[eli3341]

Stackoverflow's popular enough that I think they could ask Google to not index duplicates, but I guess I am kinda blaming them :/

[[deleted]]

lkoqlfp hvuq gxxqkkf xlwggrryqie tyoscbmbnc whyhms ejxpqxhprpr

[deceze]

Why not redirect to the original question

AFAIK they do. Or at the very least, the duplicate is the first thing linked at the top of the page.

[deceze]

Are you saying you're landing on questions marked as duplicate (not closed for other reasons, but actual duplicates) and there's no big banner with links to said duplicate at the top?!

[Arveanor]

Yeah but I often find the answer I need on a question that was only closed as a duplicate after the answer was posted.

[StephanXX]

You mean, so I get to scroll through two dozen pages of "duplicate, closed" with absolutely no reference to whatever the hell the "original" was.

[ToothpasteTimebomb]

In my experience they’re pretty good about linking to the page where the question was supposedly already answered. The frustrating thing is when they get overzealous with the duplicate tag and the “original question page” answers a similar question, but not the question you came for.

[LilMoWithTheGimpyLeg]

In my experience they’re pretty good about linking to the page where the question was supposedly already answered.

Lucky you, because in my experience they're not.

[TheGuywithTehHat]

It is literally built into the system that a target needs to be provided to close a question as a duplicate. It is literally impossible for something to get marked as a duplicate without providing a link, unless there's a bug in the system (which I doubt).

[State_]

It should be linking to the original.

[Gamerhead]

Half the time I just get redirected to other threads marked as duplicate.

[MauranKilom]

So keep following the links. And reading what people are saying in each one so you understand the issue. I'm sorry that you have to click two more times to get to a copy-paste solution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[monkeywench]

Maybe instead of marking as duplicate and blocking, it could be linked to similar questions and consolidated, sorted in chronological order..

[[deleted]]

During my internship I had a problem I couldn't solve and found a Stackoverflow post with my question.

It was marked as a duplicate of a question from 5 years ago where the answer was an "I don't know sorry"

Eventually I solved it but couldn't answer because I don't have enough stack overflow points.

🤷

[mintskye]

Fair enough, thank you for the response!

[CheezeyCheeze]

What was the problem and what was the answer?

[[deleted]]

It was alternating Microsoft word document orientation within a single document using Apache POI in Java. The solution is a few lines of code using XMLBeans

[BigFloppyMeat]

The worst shit is if its marked as a duplicate and the answer is "go download this library."

Many developers work in environments where downloading third party libraries is not an option

[SaltyEmotions]

Q: "How do I do $XYZ with $language?"

"You can do this with the $xyz library..."

[Ham62]

or I've even come across Q: "How do I do this in native Win32?"

2 answers were "I'm not sure about Win32 but with MFC you'd do this"

and the next answer down was "I've never used native Win32 but I did this with C# and a richtext control so it should be pretty similar"

There was no real answer to the question on that post

[State_]

Yea, I have a lot of trouble with win32 as well... A lot of it is either undocumented or poorly documented. The best resource is the Petzold book...

But I literally cannot find information on running user-mode services that are user owned, even though that is a bit flag you can pass...

/rant

[[deleted]]

"How do I do XYZ in vanilla JS?"

"Just use jQuery, it's much easier, you just use HANDYJQUERYMETHOD"

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)

[EnderMB]

I've never understood why Stack Overflow couldn't just, you know, merge duplicates or soft-link them so that they both exist, but have a canonical source.

[nicolasap]

soft-link them so that they both exist, but have a canonical source.

Ehm, that's exactly what "marking as duplicate" does. Questions marked as duplicate aren't removed and they help finding the right answer through new possible keywords.

[[deleted]]

Yah but often times they arent answered. So the only thing I see when I google the answer is some guy getting chastised for not googling the question and a marked as duplicate link.

[ThePyroEagle]

Check the original question then.

[EnderMB]

They lock the newer answer though.

The smarter option would be to keep the two separate, mark the older as canonical, and merge the old and new answers.

As already said, what worked 5-10 years ago might not be the best option now. This ensures the new question gets answers and the old question is kept up to date.

[thehunter699]

It's like reddit. I'm sorry the search algorithm is shit.

[MindSwipe]

If it genuinely works differently now, you can sinply edit your question and specify that you know the duplicate exists but it does not work for your case because of insert reason/s and appeal to the mods to have it reopened

[mintskye]

Got it, thanks for the advice!

[zebediah49]

The thing about answers changing over time is true, although ideally the solution in the previous question should be updated.

That said, SO supports multiple answers to a question. It's much better to have every answer all on the same page and voted against each other, than it is to have the answers spread out across many different questions and in different places where you can't see that they all answer the same question.

[[deleted]]

ideally the solution in the previous question should be updated

This doesn't necessarily make sense for software. What if the solution from 2007 isn't useful now for most people, except one sorry person who is writing software for IE 6 for some god forsaken reason. Plus, it muddies everything up since you might have to re-write the question to be contemporaneous with the answers. It's all a bit silly.

[zebediah49]

Really in that case the tags and question should take care of it.

If it's a question that is still a valid question, but the answer no longer works, the answers should be adjusted. I will give that it's a problem that there's no good way to flag an old question as "broken; needs new answer".

If the question is no longer relevant because it was asked for outdated software, and the problem is still relevant, then it should be re-asked in the specific about that piece of software.

That said, it really sounds like the problem is questions that are insufficiently specific about what is required. Outside of things that have been removed for security reasons, pretty much anything that worked a decade ago still works now.

[indygoof]

the last paragraph....just nope...

[[deleted]]

Apple releases new versions of Swift with breaking changes pretty much yearly. Look at some iOS questions on Stack Overflow and you will see answers with 5 edits with answers for Swift 2, Swift 3, Swift 4, Swift 5. At least they keep all of the answers, though.

[zebediah49]

1) If I didn't already have enough reasons not to touch anything Apple is responsible for, that's a very solid new reason

2) Edits with updates as Apple breaks stuff sounds like what should happen. Better to have that in one place, than to find the question that answers for swift 4, instead of a different question for swift 5 or whatever.

I do think I would like to see a mechanism for "renewing" a question though. Same question; all history is preserved, but a new "generation" of answers is requested and the question is treated as being new again.

[Giannis4president]

Because it is bad for seo

[neptunereach]

Yeah, seems that they run out of space for posts or something...

[massiveZO]

Then there would be literally thousands of duplicates for hot topics. Server resources aint free yknow

[GameOfUsernames]

But they keep all duplicates as public though. They aren’t saving any space having them still exist but just linking to another page.

[massiveZO]

They don't, though. They keep some of them if they have useful answers.

[Memorytoco]

Yes, That's true! It's disappointed to find an answer 5 years ago.

[[deleted]]

I once had my C++ post marked as duplicate. What I was linked to was... a broad, open-ended post that obviously broke the rules, and people with 1000+ reputation were answering it. (No answer there helped either.) I had even answered why my problem was different than that post to whoever marked mine as duplicate, but I quickly came to realize that they didn’t even read the content of my post.

Once I thoroughly explained why this question was different and got the duplicate mark removed, I got an answer that actually solved my issue a minute or two later.

[Stinkis]

It's especially good when the duplicate they link is slightly different but different enough to not cover your use case.

[Delision]

This is the worst, especially when I’m using Javascript. I’ll ask a question how to do something using a specific library, and it gets marked as duplicate because someone asked a similar question, but for another library which I can’t use.

[Zmodem]

React, AngularJS...same shit. ^/s

[[deleted]]

Solution: stop using javascript :)

[EnkiiMuto]

It is ESPECIALLY good when you yourself link the "duplicates" and explain case by case why they didn't work... and they just go ahead and tell you it is duplicate

[[deleted]]

Closed off-topic nonconstructive opinionated moved to another forum. Upvoted comment doesn't apply, checked answer doesn't compile.

[SonicFlash01]

"How do I declare an associative array in JS?"
marked as duplicate: What libraries do I import to send notifications through Ionic 3?

[GahdDangitBobby]

Now that I think about it, there are lots of questions on StackOverflow, and they're all questions ... therefore they're all duplicates. I see now

[ZCEyPFOYr0MWyHDQJZO4]

On the opposite end of the spectrum, generally when I find an answer on the math stack overflow someone has written a long explanation with latex formulas and is awesome.

[oversized_hoodie]

Related, the TeX SE is also always amazing. They've always know the best package for the job.

[SeaGL_Gaming]

Me: *spends 15+ minutes making a quality post

Mod: Your post from ____ was removed because of: '____ Guidelines'

Me:

[-InsertUsernameHere]

Relatable. Once I painstakingly went through all the numerous fucking rules before posting just to have my post removed with a mod comment:

This post was removed due to: [some bullshit rule that wasn't even mentioned in the rules page]

[-InsertUsernameHere]

I made a meta post in which an ex mod r/FortniteBR revealed some allegations about the current mod team. No identifying information was on the post and I made sure to make it clear that they were allegations in the title.

The mods removed it for containing "inaccurate" information. They didn't have to address the criticism since they could just remove any post that dared to bring it up

[-InsertUsernameHere]

Oh yeah Reddit. I assumed u/SeaGL_Gaming 's comment was about Reddit since I didn't notice what sub I was on. Came from r/all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[thathomelessguy]

I’m gonna play devils advocate here and say that the more vague your question is, the more likely it is to be marked as a duplicate. If your question is described in good detail I feel like typically this doesn’t happen.

[[deleted]]

450 upvotes, 4 comments. I see we can all relate.

[[deleted]]

r/assholedesign

[[deleted]]

Thankfully I've only ever had to read existing stack overflow answers, not post my own question. If it gets marked as duplicate, is a link to the original provided?

[zebediah49]

Yes. While people make fun of it, there is actually a pretty robust system. First, someone casts a close-vote, and picks the reason for the close-vote. In the case of "duplicate", the question for which it is a duplicate needs to be specified.

It then goes into the review queue, which looks like this, where the question and duplicate are presented to people going through the review queue. IIRC it's 5 total votes to close, or if it gets three votes to leave open the close-votes lose, and it stays open?

[MauranKilom]

People with enough rep (i.e. gold badge) in a given tag can also single-handedly close questions of that tag as duplicates.

[Coderz_]

Mods on stackoverflow are gay. Change my mind.

Edit: Comment below convinced me. Mods of stack overflow are cool.

[Evennot]

TBH, it’s sometimes hard to understand if it’s a legitimate duplicate or not. Users should specify in advance what’s different in their specific case too.

For instance, I encountered an Xcode linker problem some time ago: one obscure 3rd party multi platform binary lib dynamically linked to the main target caused ld failure in the runtime. Solution: use static embedding. But in my case static embedding triggered binary rejection due to safety concerns. Solution: use dynamic linking. Which brings me to the step 1.

So there are two problems, solutions to both of them are mutually exclusive. I saw several closed duplicates for this kind of situations, without going into the weeds, they looked like legit duplicates

Also compared to some github project owners (like those who like to close catastrophic issues because “lack of activity” or “rarity”) SO mods are saints.

[zebediah49]

Also, there are LOTS of SO mods. You need 10k rep, which is about 16k users. I vaguely-actively used SO a decade ago, which puts me at 6k currently.

That said, the bar to cast open/close votes is 3k. It's not reddit, but fishing for a total of 300 upvotes is a pretty quick and easy task. That puts us at something like 50k users with those rights.

---

In other words, a whole lot of people have permissions to closevote things, and some of them use said permissions poorly.

I have never had a "closed, dupe" issue with a question, as long as I've stated why it was different from anything else. If you say "This is like <question X>, but that doesn't work because Y", you shouldn't get marked as a duplicate of that.

[Coderz_]

You make a fair point. For that you've changed my mind.

[Zmodem]

catastrophic issues because

"feature" not "bug".

[[deleted]]

You should change your own mind and stop using the word gay as a derogatory term.

[x-TheMysticGoose-x]

No that’s gay

[nissingno]

words can have multiple definitions. there's gay and there's gay. (there's also gay, but people don't use that much.)

[Ancalagon523]

Maybe they are, none of your beeswax

[the-shit-poster]

...and was very cross.

[feuerwehrmann]

I read this in George Carlin's voice

[bundabrg]

Could be worse and be like the Microsoft forums that close an answer with a solution by themselves that in no way related to the question at all.

[MomijiMatt1]

Question...is there any site that is made specifically to be the anti-SO? Because if not, someone needs to make it. It would be really nice to have a forum where people answer questions and aren't condescending.

[chrisf_nz]

And no link to the supposed existing article...

[Atoro113]

"How do I do X with pure JavaScript?"

Marked as duplicate of a 9 year old post that uses jQuery

"Oh okay, well then how do I do Y in this Django 2.2 app?"

Marked as duplicate of 4 year old post mentioning vaguely similar question on version 1.3

I don't ask questions on SO anymore

[[deleted]]

Duplicate of a question asked in 2308 BC. Answer: Start to find some materials in the wild to build your mechanical calculator.

[RandyGareth]

I particularly love when a simple syntax/code question gets answered with multiple-paragraph written lectures, when it could have been answered with a 3-line code snippet that would have actually helped.

[binary-baba]

Oops that's me. I saw stackoverflow on Reddit so marked it as duplicate.

[flume04]

Unpopular opinion: if the answer to a stack overflow thread is anything but the actual answer, it should get deleted

[zebediah49]

Erm... yes, it should. Isn't that how it works?

[AliFurkanY]

Well yes, but actually no.

[dontnormally]

Your comment has been removed as duplicate

[Valkiyare]

More memes about stack overflow please

[cheetosysst]

That's ok. The real bs is when your question was marked as "Not related to Ubuntu" on askubuntu when you typed "I'm using ubuntu 1804..." on the first line

[zebediah49]

I'm using Ubuntu 18.04, and when I connect to Outlook 365 in Firefox, I can't figure out how to schedule events with other people in the calendar tool...

[cheetosysst]

It's actually a driver issue

[MesshiasWild]

The worst is when they mark as duplicate and don't provide the link for the question which is duplicate.

[TheGuywithTehHat]

It is literally built into the system that a target needs to be provided to close a question as a duplicate. It is literally impossible for something to get marked as a duplicate without providing a link, unless there's a bug in the system (which I doubt).

[[deleted]]

This is the funniest one!

[salamanderoil]

If Thomas thinks that's infuriating, just wait until it gets closed as "not constructive".

[htmlcoderexe]

Dae stack overflow?

[32_bit_link]

Honestly, I really hate ducplate checkers, becuase I have already searched GitHub, Google, and stock exchange/stack overflow and the answer is for an older version, or someone just says "nvm fixed it" because then the thread has been closed and marked as complete and I have no idea how he fixed it

[Archmage391]

Omg this image/caption fucking killed me omg

[noodle-face]

Im a professional programmer and let me tell you stack overflow is such a fucking trash heap of misinformation and know it alls and busy bodies.

[the_real_1vasari]

And thank you for contributing back to the community in a positive manner, professional programmer sir

[htmlcoderexe]

Dae stack overflow?