When I submit things that are direct dupes Digg normally takes me right to the entry and does not let me resubmit the same thing. In this particular case the item had been posted to multiple websites and Digg did not catch them as dupes.
Here is the Digg entry.
I conferred with the submitter via the comments and after doing some searching he found my entry from 42 days ago and another one from 12 days ago that had made it to the front page!
If you look at the URL for the one submitted today you will see the number 4 appended to the end. This implies that there are three other entries with this same name in the system!
When I did a search on Digg for "Idiot Test" I found four pages of results and numerous entries in that list had achieved front page status. The oldest entry for this particular "test" was made by me!
Now I'm not here to bitch about how someone else got the credit for something I found first. What I am trying to do is point out a very serious problem on Digg in regards to dupes!
Digg needs to implement something where if a story is a dupe (or a possible dupe) it should be allowed to go through but not become active until one of the many Digg moderators has a chance to look at it.
Just as those moderators are there to look for spam they should also be on guard for dupes.
They can then look over the entry, and any entries the system marked as being a possible dupe, and quickly decide if the entry should be allowed to go into the upcoming section or not.
Digg could also implement a "related link" section below each entry and above the comments where any dupe submissions could be listed.
Using this system, users would be able to post duplicate articles and have them appended to the main article. This would have been a great help when James Kim went missing as one super entry could have had all of the smaller articles clustered below it.
This would also cut down on the number of dupes as users will know that submitting a dupe will not get them a shot at the homepage but will allow them to get some glory by having submitted a "related link" to a popular story.
Making the homepage is the only glory Digg offers it's legion of users. Putting a stop to dupes would be a great way to show us that it cares about the members!
Now I can understand if something is a year old and someone wants to resubmit it so that the new members can find it but... Perhaps we should have a third tab after "Upcoming Stories" marked "Blasts from the Past" where old stories that get Diggs can be listed?
To summarize my ideas:
Feel free to leave comments.