I think it's sort of luck of the draw. Sometimes you can try and won't find it because the last person tagged it wrong, or did a bad intro. I was surprised my post from last night wasn't a double. Just luck, I think.

Actually, the delete hammer hasn't fallen yet. Seriously, the last 6 or so fpp's I've made have all been kicked because they were doubles. The weird thing is that the Sears connection was mentioned in the comments to the first posting, and the search didn't notice that.

It was only 50 posts different, most of the search engines don't index everyday so they'll miss stuff like that. You really have to pay attention to the front page if you want to avoid doubles. One of the reasons I hate cutesy, non descriptive, or surprise posts.

Meh. It's gone.

Doohickie, sorry to hear it. FWIW I thought it was an interesting post, and frankly I rarely if ever realise stuff is doubled cos I skim through MeFi maybe once a week or so. AskMe is where I happened onto the MeFi sites to begin with, and it's where I prefer to hang out anyhow. The blue is just too... unfriendly, basically.

This is the primary reason I never post anything to MeFi and probably never will. It takes three times as long to figure out whether it's a double than it does to research an interesting post. I mean for fuck's sake some of these pedants will go back five and six years just so they can flag a FPP and/or make a whiny callout in MeTa about the fact that it's a repost or else they just think it's crap.

Quite frankly I have neither the time nor motivation to go through all the work of finding something post-worthy only to get snarked/deleted because I didn't realise it was posted back in 2001. There are too many people on that site who seem to make a career out of reading MeFi just so they can snark/flag/bitch about something. This makes me a consumer, not a contributor, so... eh.

Reposts are often really easy to spot. You recognise the site, figure out the key word that allows you to do the site search in google and find it and presto: notice of the double. Takes less than a minute.

Johnny come latelies like Doohickee (\I keed. I keed.) are at a disadvantage because it's not a double for them, they don't have the hind brain memory that tweaks on having seen the site before.

I think a key thing is too not go out and research a post, at least not initially. Stumble across something, do a site search on some common key words (and segments of the URL), compose a "Whee, look at this bright shiny object" post and let her fly. If you double no problem, you took all the steps you could.

The only thing to add is if you are posting newsfilter or if you are posting something you first found thru digg/ BB/ slashdot/ MoFi/ K5/ Fark/ et. al. you need to really examine the front page going back a week to see if it's been posted since the last spider.

The post in question was something I first saw on late night TV. I figured no one else had seen it because we all know nerds don't watch TV at night; they irc.

;-)