Classes on Piazza can get noisy with lots of questions being posted on a daily basis. Unfortunately, as the number of posts grows, students tend to get overwhelmed when encountering an issue. Instead of searching the forums for a similar problem, they blindly create new questions that might have already been discussed. This increases the amount of duplicate posts making the class forum unnecessarily cluttered.
Duplicare brings a solution to this problem by providing a
simple userscript
that enhances Piazza by leveraging the power of
the existent search functionality whenever the student writes a new
post. Its main objective is to reduce the number of duplicate
questions saving both the students and the instructors time and
effort.
This script has been tested on both Firefox and Chrome. To start using it, follow these steps:
-
Install Greasemonkey for Firefox or Tampermonkey for Chrome.
-
Install Duplicare from OpenUserJS.
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Make sure to enable the script!
Using the script is straightforward:
-
Simply visit the Piazza forum for your class.
-
Click on the
New Post
button. -
As soon as you start typing the Summary for your post, Duplicare will automatically initiate a search on the left pane using the same words.
Hopefully this will help you find a possible solution to your problem, by finding similar questions, and avoid creating a duplicate post.
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Make sure Duplicare is enabled. You can verify this by clicking on the Greasemonkey (Firefox) or Tampermonkey (Chrome) icon in your browser, and make sure the script is running.
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Refresh the page. This will force the script to be reloaded.
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If none of the solutions above worked, please create an issue!