While attempting to submit a large number of stories to Digg I kept running into items that had been posted on Digg a year or more ago. Normally Digg does not enforce much dupe checking and will let you submit that dupe if it is a dupe of an old story. Some times Digg even lets you submit a dupe when the same link was entered only a few minutes ago!
I was mildly surprised when I went to submit something that had been submitted to Digg well over two years ago and I was sent back to the "dupe check" screen with a warning in a large font:
Are You Sure It's Not a Duplicate?
I'm used to getting the
We think your story might be a duplicate of one that was submitted by someone else.
Please check the stories below to make sure yours is not the same as one of them. If it's the same, you can digg that story. If it's not the same, continue using the button below.
message but I've never had it refuse to allow me to submit something that was a dupe of an old story!
Is Digg finally getting serious about combating duplicate entries? I sure hope so!
In the past there has always been a problem where popular stories get submitted multiple times. It's not always Digg's fault as an AP story can be published on many Internet news sites and the Diggers may be submitting links to each of those sites that has been fed the AP story.
Digg has used some searching in the title and description to try and root out these dupes and ask you not to submit them but... Some people still do.
The more unscrupulous people will submit a dupe and then tell their friends to bury all other submissions that are dupes of theirs. It doesn't always matter who submitted first, it only matters who gets the most Diggs first!
I know Digg is not perfect but I am always glad to see improvements made in regards to duplicate stories being submitted.