"That filename is already in use"

I get that message from time to time when uploading images, but I'm kind of left wondering why it's a problem.

For one thing, the filename isn't going to be whatever it's uploaded as anyway. TV tropes adds an underscore and a few random digits to the name of the file being uploaded, so even if someone else uploaded a file with the same filename it's going to have a different filename than whatever the next user is adding, which in turn is going to have an underscore and a few random digits added as well.

For what it's worth, maybe it's that TV tropes keeps some kind of "record" of the "original filenames" and is for whatever reason trying to discourage people from uploading files that happened to have the same original filename before their respective uploads... maybe it's based on concerns that different people might upload the same pic to TV tropes and waste too much of its memory, but even then, the message provides NO link to whatever's already on the database, which would be a link it should provide if THAT'S the point.

Then again, sometimes I manage to upload two◊ files◊ of the same original filename ANYWAY.

In and of itself it's just a minor inconvience, and I'm just curious as to what it's about.

edited 31st Jan '11 8:20:11 AM by neoYTPism

My guess is that it's a bug.

Why would a "bug" cause it to say a filename is already in use?

edited 1st Feb '11 2:27:25 PM by neoYTPism

Because it's not supposed to happen but is. Anyway, what filenames have you had problems with?

Any short named files it will add a few numbers at the end of the file, Longer ones it will not add the numbers.

Seeing as the numbers were instituted to avoid duplicate names, I'd say that's a bug.