Well, I've strayed away from this topic for a while now, because I could see how it could come off as controversial and I'd really hate to facilitate a feud here, so let me start off by saying that this discussion topic is in no way intended to offend anyone or come off as a complaint. This is just an observation of mine that I noticed and I was curious to see if you have noticed the same thing and have any opinions on it.
This is something I notice a lot in the Game/Forum Help boards, but the observation I've been making is that there seems to be a lot of redundancy in posts. This isn't happening all the time and everywhere, but I've noticed it more times then for it to be a coincidence. What I mean by redundancy is that, say someone puts out a help thread asking a question. And a generous handful of our community comes to aid this person in need of assistance. Which I totally love! It's so great to see that there are so many people willing to help out an individual here.
The case of redundancy comes about in the replies: What I've been noticing is that suggestions and ideas are often repeated. An example being that Person A replies to the help thread with the suggestion of, I don't know "Restart your game" plus a few other things. And then Person B will sometimes come along and say "Restart you game like mentioned above" or "Restart your game, like so..."
Before I become hypocrital, Yes, I am guilty of being that Person B too, it's all fine and most of the time it ends up helping to reinforce or better explain what the person before had said.
But do you guys ever think, that maybe a post like that is unnecessary? It almost seems odd to me that we have to restate the answer given above maybe just to get a post in or get acknowledged. Maybe that's not always the case and maybe we want to restate the idea just to be an extra helping hand. I'm not saying that it has to be driven by a jealousy factor of the person helping above. And this is such a general thing too. It pertains to plenty of other websites as well, Yahoo Answers for example.
So I guess the main questions here are: do you notice this happening on our forums? What do you think about it? Is it necessary and for a good reason, or is it unecessary and for publicity/post for your count? Is there something that you would suggest to users who would like to help others but not seem redundant?