Because this site doesn't link identical URL's together into a single post, which it should.

As for why now, someone on the interwebs reposted something old that members hadn't seen before

@1of5 I don’t think combining post that contain identical links is a good solution. It would not be good for users and would be a technical nightmare.

I’m more curious how & why this old news suddenly resurfaced. Do people just blindly link articles without reading them?

@indirect76 I think they should so the discussion isn't split between 2 or more posts. Plus, we wouldn't see multiple posts about the same thing, which seemed to irritate you a bit.

Sounds somewhat like they do. If it's an old article that had been posted here before, combining the new and old posts would have let the posters know its been on the site before and they may not have posted it.

@1of5 I’m not really irritated, more curious. I do think that combining posts like that opens up a huge technical can of worms. Changing the code & database around to support a post with multiple authors is not a trivial task, and that is just the start.

@indirect76 strip the url and add whatever comments the new poster has as the newest reply to the old post. It should actually be fairly easy, considering there's a whole seperate way to post links than there is to generate one without links.

Things don't die on the internet, and someone who runs a news feed may have just discovered the duck dynasty nut, did a Google search, and posted it without checking the date.

@1of5 On the surface it may soudn like a good idea, but I have seen posts where I have had a different tkae on it, paretl out of readign more about it nd partly out of having thught on and stewed bout it.

It is very easy to skp over repeted posts when browsign them, but limiting repeated posts will damp down discussion as much as it would make for cleaner postings, because peopel come to different takes and viewpoints after w while when they have thought about it or been exposed to mroe information.

@snytiger6 I'm not opposed to the way it is, per say, and considering how even simple changes to the site seem to create 4 problems for every one fixed I can certainly sympathize with not wanting to change things.

On the other hand I do think it'd cut down on redundant posting. Way back when one of the concepts here was combining even similar posts together to keep redundancy down. Then hashtags were supposed to do it, then it appears to have been abandoned with the "here's similar posts to what you're writing" feature that everyone ignores because they are rarely similar.

So I expect no change on this, although I do think combining exact URL's would be of some benefit just to keep the discussion in 1 place. Although it's pretty common for only 1 posting of a link posted multiple times to have the majority of the discussion, so I may be wrong.