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In this user's profile (bookmarks) one user is shown as having bookmarked this question twice:

User Profile - Bookmarks

This doesn't appear to be the same question as: Was there a brief system glitch which caused some questions to be posted twice? or New question asking form sometimes leads to accidental double posts of questions though it's certainly possible that the cause is the same.

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    This is a long-standing issue regarding merges. We don't detect and invalidate duplicate votes when accounts are merged together.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Sep 11, 2020 at 4:55
  • I was going to edit in animuson's comment but in the interim it was tagged status-review by Adam so I'll leave that as the final edit.
    – Rob
    Commented Sep 11, 2020 at 5:59
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    11 instances on MSE until last sunday
    – rene Mod
    Commented Sep 11, 2020 at 7:02
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    @adamlear 2478 instances on Stack Overflow, using rene's SEDE query - this is a fairly large problem if it applies to votes; as animuson's comment mentions.
    – Rob
    Commented Sep 11, 2020 at 10:15
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    This user has an unusually large number of duplications from page 5 to 11. --- Also, I asked in The Tavern chat if rene's SEDE query is undercounting.
    – Rob
    Commented Sep 11, 2020 at 12:49
  • Another interesting anomaly is that a user can be shown simultaneously that they have both voted up and down for the same question.
    – Rob
    Commented May 23, 2021 at 4:43

2 Answers 2

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Thanks for raising this. I've reproduced this and confirmed with the SEDE work you've all done (thank you!) that this is still an issue. I've put this onto our backlog to address, but it may take some time before we get to it based on where our roadmap priorities are. Adding for now, and will have the team update here once we get at this again.

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Ultimately we might want to handle duplicate votes of all types, but those have a higher potential for edge cases (for example, how far would we want to or need to go to reverse any effects that those votes had - deleted posts, post owner's reputation, etc), so for now, we're going with the two simplest cases - bookmarks and follows.

Future user merges will take care of duplicate bookmarks and follows by soft-deleting the ones coming in from the merged user, and I've also removed the duplicate bookmark for this specific user.

Thanks for the report!

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    So only those bookmarks that both the parent user and merged user had placed will be removed, or will all bookmarks be removed from the merged user on merging (including non-duplicates)?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Oct 15, 2021 at 20:10
  • The mentioned user has only one bookmark, but the question has two bookmarks and it shows only one on its history. Should I blame caching?
    – Rafael Tavares
    Commented Oct 15, 2021 at 20:15
  • Thanks Adam. BTW voting is an issue, and very difficult to correct, in The Tavern almost 2 months ago a user reported that the arrows indicated that they had both voted up and down; I don't recall who (Forest?) reporting it to Catija?
    – Rob
    Commented Oct 15, 2021 at 20:36
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    @SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Only duplicates. Everything else will be moved over to the parent user. (Technically, even duplicate bookmark/follow votes are moved over, but they'll have a deletion date set.)
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Oct 15, 2021 at 20:39
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    @RafaelTavares Yeah, the bookmark count is stored separately on the post, but it should update overnight.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Oct 15, 2021 at 20:40
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    @Rob Hah. Looks like forest's situation has already been handled. I believe users in that situation should be able to self-correct it if they are able to retract whichever vote they don't want to keep (though it might require a post edit).
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Oct 15, 2021 at 20:42

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