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by robbomacrae 1665 days ago
Not at all. You only have to fail the first request. It is an approach I took with my own attempt at a search engine way back! In fact I know personally that there is at least one patent out there that suggests initial 1st time request users being asked to provide the appropriate response as an efficient way to teach systems for future users.

Obviously failing first requests isn't ideal but for popular requests it quickly becomes insignificant. Wikipedia might (if they don't already) want to make a similar suggestion for users to contribute when finding a low content/missing page.

1 comments

> Obviously failing first requests isn't ideal but for popular requests it quickly becomes insignificant.

The first request can also be called asynchronously, and display a message to the user that it is 'processing....'.