There were two squawks merged under “Plane lands on San Jose roadway - no injuries”
At one point one was +3 votes, one -3 votes. After merge vote total was -1.
PhotoFinish and I were discussing problems with the vote tallying on merged squawks in the post.
There appear to be some oddities with handling multiple votes by a member. How do they get handled?
They seem somewhat different between voting on one’s own comment and another’s.
Is the Squawk posting system internal to FA or is it a COTS subsystem? Are votes anonymous or
internally identified by member id: if squawk is merged are duplicate votes discarded?
I believe I’ve seen that comments are merged, but what else happens?
Not a priority issue, just trying to discern the rules of the game.
When a duplicate squawk is merged, here’s what happens:
The duplicate squawk is disabled
Comments on the duplicate squawk are moved to the original squawk, with threading and comment voting intact
Subscriptions (e.g., if you’re getting email notifications of comments) to the duplicate squawk are moved to the original squawk if a subscription doesn’t exist on the original squawk
Votes on the duplicate squawk are moved to the original squawk if the voter hasn’t already voted on the original squawk
On behalf of the submitter of the duplicate squawk, a comment is posted to the original squawk that contains the content (title, description, link) of the duplicate squawk
So, yes, voting is “merged” but because some people will upvote the original and downvote the duplicate, the votes on the duplicate are deleted if the voter has already voted on the original.
In response to the other questions, Squawks is a custom FlightAware product. Yes, votes are tied to a user ID, which allows enforcement of single vote limits.
