Automaticly search for similar topics before allowing one to post?

[TiagoTiago]

I've seen several threads posted by newbies (and some by people with a bit more time on the forum) that are pretty much remakes of pre-existing threads; what if before posting, the system did a search using the title and (perhaps the body of the post as well) and displayed a list of possible pre-existing versions of the thread sorted by likelihood of being a duplicate, asking the poster to confirm if their new thread is indeed new? (people with enough time/post count on the forum could be given the option of turning of the search confirmation thing)

[fascistmuffin]

I doubt that'd do much good, especially in the newbie section.

We have a search feature on this forum already, and the people who are forum-friendly will be using that feature before starting a new topic. The people who like to start new topics for everything will continue to not search, and it's not like the search feature is hidden any they're missing it. If this was implemented, I bet most will ignore the search results, say it's new, and post away. Reddit somewhat has this feature, and the same stuff gets posted a million times over and over.

[error]

There's no good automated way of doing this. At least not until computers become as intelligent as humans, and if that ever happens, we'll have bigger problems.

That said, you can help by suggesting threads of interest to such people, adding commonly requested information to the wiki (and, for that matter, improving its organization) and so on.