YSK: Hitting submit more than once will post your comment/thread multiple times, even with the lag
With the sluggishness of the site these last few days you can sometimes get slowness or infinitely loading icon when hitting submit. If you aren't sure if your post submitted, refresh the original page in a different tab before hitting submit again to see if it went through. I see double and triple posts in almost every comment section.
You should also know you can join smaller instances to help alleviate this problem. You'll still see most of the same content, especially if the instance has active users. Don't be too shy to sign up on some random instance, worse case scenario you just don't get approved.
I joined my instance after being on Lemmy.ml about a month ago for a day, and there was so much lag because it was the largest instance at the time. I then switched to my current instance when it only had ~50 users on it and it made the world of a difference. I went from seeing the site crash every 5 seconds and posts taking 30 seconds to submit, to having a stable connection to the Fediverse.
Overall, I feel like everyone should try to join smaller instances to distribute the load so that you don’t have a bad experience, and the instances don’t get overwhelmed. It’s a win-win for everyone.
Just to add to this, at least in wefwef, I sometimes get an error when I tap Post, saying that it failed. I am then left on the page, and can hit Post again. But it didn’t fail the first time, the post was made.
So this is not just users being impatient. There is a bug.
I have not written real code for a very long time, and I don’t know the lemmy code base at all… but I described this bug to GPT-4 and it just turned me on to idempotency.
programming.dev is getting to be pretty damn slow too...
Comments post in 5-30 seconds, and up votes can take 30+ seconds to post. Searches are pointless, and loading comments can be a repetitive painful process of reloading till it works (504 gateway timeout)
Yes! The Lemmy devs should make it so that you can't hit the submit button 10 times in a row. People hit submit and nothing happens so they hit it again and again and again. Now there's a bunch of identical posts.
I remember the old days where sites would have a message saying "only hit submit once". That's gone now since sites prevent users from hitting submit more than once. I don't think Lemmy is doing that though!
You should be able to hit the submit button as many times as you want, but it should have a single transaction ID so the server can ignore duplicate submissions.
Yep, it’s called an idempotent key. The server gets a request with a specific key (usually a random guid), stores it and ignores any further requests with the same key. It would be a great addition to Lemmy.
It's problematic because often you'll get an error that says it failed to post the comment. In which case it's fair to try again, but it actually posted anyways.
Resubmitting is the reasonable response to an error that said it failed. Lemmy should add some sort of duplicate message prevention when they have the time to improve the ux.
What I do (web browser) is simply refresh the community to see if the post has posted yet. If it hasn't, I try again. Around a third of the time you get spinny wheel though, it actually did submit, and just forgot to let you know.
Also note that if a large amount of time has passed while you're writing a response, you'll sort of time out, and the first attempt to post won't work, but because it's refreshing your session. The second attempt will post
I copy any of my comments that took a while to type (longer, detailed, or sometimes just adhd) before hitting submit. I've been burned too many times from all different areas of technology. If something goes wrong, just try again and paste whatever I typed out
Only sometimes. Other times it won't post your comment at all. I still check to make sure my comments don't post more than once but sometimes the lag is so bad it's impossible to do even that.
The problem is a UI thing too. In wefwef for example half the time you go to post something and it says ‘error posting’, your comment actually did post. But sometimes it doesn’t.
I typically go until I see success and then delete any duplicates I left on accident.
I made a post and got "network error", but it turns out it went through anyway. Took three tries to not get the error, so I ended up making three posts. Had to delete the two extras.