I'm at a loss at why this was possible, and I have no idea how to fix this. I don't think there is a way to remove sample entries yet. I'm surprised that there is no dialog that says "This entry already exists" Maybe this could be implemented? This is a really serious bug.

not sure how botb would decide that the entry already exists. it's permitted to have multiple entries with the same name, even by the same user:

http://battleofthebits.com/arena/Entry/smoked+out+hepcat+jazz+licks/7237/
http://battleofthebits.com/arena/Entry/smoked+out+hepcat+jazz+licks/7238/

maybe we (read: puke7) can decide that it is silly to permit this but on the other hand it seems like such an edge case; i've never heard of it happening before.

puke could generate hashes of entries if he wanted to protect against this. finding duplicate entries should be pretty cheap in that case i think.

that being said, it would add some (small maybe?) overhead to the submission process, which people probably wouldn't like seeing as BotB seems to check your entry time when it's done processing it (longer submission processing => more last second late penalties)

imo this is the sort of thing admins seem happy to help with when it happens (thanks guys!) and as Jangler said it's rare and harmless enough that it probably isn't worth the implementation time.