New feature

Thumbs up! Death to Dupes.

Thanks for developing a way to eliminate evil twins. 😈

Thanks so much and thanks for letting us know!

I'm guessing this will also catch the repetitive spam posts but the first one will stick until you all can clear it .... usually Monday AM. lol!!

Oops, I just suggested to a poster that she put a copy on another tab. She asked questions about the Best of Italy tour, but on the Italy section, not the RS tours.

Kudos to Andrew and the team for continually improving our beloved Forum!

Thanks for all your hard work!

Bravo! An excellent development.

Most excellent. Thanks. I would expect that if some of the duplicate post is unique it will fly. The ones that are trouble are when somebody keeps hitting the submit button without noticing that the first one worked. We'll give it tries and see how it goes.

And by warning us, thanks Webbie, we can answer when the inevitable moan comes that somebody is frustrated that they can't make 4 identical posts over 4 forums covering their entire trip.

This will be fun. Do we need to buy an E-ticket?

Oh- IT WORKS - just tried it... yay

Yes, this is a problem, especially with relatively new posters. The "no duplicate postings" is implied, but not known. There was a recent case of someone starting multiple streams, all similar, in different sections. I responded to the first, but by Stream 12, no one was responding.

I appreciate the time and effort that RS puts into the forum. I hope that it is good for RS. It's helpful to me, and I try to help others.

Dear Webmaster: I have another "project" for your IT group. How about when one does a search, the items come up in chronological order? I have done some searches recently, and there are posts from 9 years ago mixed in with posts from 3 months ago. In general, I feel that the most recent posts are the most relevant, especially when the topic is travel related (e.g., train connections), recommended restaurants, day tours, etc. Thanks for your consideration.

Nigel Says:

I would expect that if some of the duplicate post is unique it will fly.

We do more than just detect duplicates by calculating similarity scores and if a post is above that threshold, we flag it.

Robert Says:

How about when one does a search, the items come up in chronological order?

If you perform a search and then filter by "Travel Forum" type, you should be able to additionally filter by some date ranges such as "6 months and newer." This should help with finding more up-to-date content from the Forum.

Thanks, Nikky.

Thanks Nikky.

I worked out a bit of what you said to me. I did a test 6 line post, and a cut and paste copy resend. That got stopped.

Then I added a completely new line at the end, and that got stopped too. What I didn't do was a paragraph long dummy and then change the country named and put in a different Forum - but I think if I had done so it would also have been stopped.

Excellent work - well done. Thanks

and having just tested that hypothesis I find that I was right....

@Nigel: Thanks very much! I never noticed the date filter after making the initial filter selection. This is very helpful.

Yes, the 6 months and newer is OK, and better than what we used to have, but I completely agree that it is too blunt a tool. Having another filter level that could pinpoint within the last week or last month would be much sharper. If you don't find a recent suitable thread then zoom out 3 months or 6 months would suit me much better.

First off thanks for the new feature, it will clean up the forum a lot.

I agree that being able to select a 6 month or 1 year period is a start, but within those parameters it would still be more helpful to be able to sort by date. From what I've seen of the search results, the default sort is by relevance and that's fine to a point, but when the results that include all search terms come before those with only partial matches ignoring 'when' the results are from it loses its helpfulness. All search results should have the option of more than one sort - sometimes relevance is more important, sometimes when the response was posted is more important.

Every little bit helps especially with duplicate posts and spam control. Thank you.