Automatic insertion of dupe-banner after just one close vote is vulnerable to abuse

Question

I see that the "close as duplicate" feature continues to undergo changes. Unfortunately, I must report negatively on this newest one.

This time, it's that a banner is added to a question as soon as the very first dup-vote is cast:

This just seems:

1. Ripe for Abuse: you can vote for absolutely anything and get it added to the question in a manner that looks official;

2. You get an official-looking sanction for a dup-vote, regardless of the fact that you haven't yet attracted enough agreement to meet the requirements to actually close the thing.

A single duplicate vote is hardly worthy of such a prominent display — if a question is truly a duplicate, worry not! Your excellent high-reputation regulars, even though you don't seem to trust us nowadays, are more than capable of identifying a true duplicate and closing it in short order. There's really no reason to undermine our community-powered discipline by advertising the initial vote in this fashion.

I would ask why so many changes are being applied without community input? And, if you need a non-OCD practical question, what problem does this change solve?

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Consider this situation:

1. Question X becomes hot due to Reddit or the Multicollider.
2. Bob sees question X but wants attention for his (unrelated) question Y.
3. Bob casts dupe close-vote on X with destination Y.
4. Much of the traffic pouring into X is now redirected to (unrelated) question Y.
5. Tons of nasty comments from confused users over why the banner is there for an unrelated question Y.

Yes, this type of abuse would warrant severe moderator consequences. But unlike vandalism edits, this banner cannot be removed (by normal users).

So you're allowing a single user to do so much damage that cannot be reversed without a moderator.

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And here's the other (very common) example pulled from the comments:

1. Bob sees a question. He (honestly) thinks it's a dupe.
2. He casts a dupe-vote.
3. 5 other uses point out that it is not a dupe.
4. Bob agrees. But he can't do anything, other than to delete the auto-inserted comment.

The banner is still there. Left to mislead anyone who visits the question.
For how long? Until the vote ages away (5 days)?

Answer 1

See my answer - we're now only showing the pre-closure banner "This question may already have an answer here" to the question owner. No one else, not even mods, will see it until after the question is closed.

Answer 2

I think the banner has the most value for the asker themselves and anonymous/low rep users. The verbiage is great for that use (oh hey, I want this answered, click) but I can see how it needlessly enforces groupthink for those who can close.

If it turns out to be a problem a possible idea is to only display the banner on unclosed posts to low rep/anonymous users and the asker of the question. This way new users see "oh hey, my precious answers!" and users with close votes just see another question with a close vote, no banner. That way the workflow is the same for closing users (ideally the review/close dialog should give them the info they need to make the decision, not the banner) but you keep the benefit for the new users, which I assume this change is intended for.

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Also this? (Image by Josh Caswell) That bug was fixed

Answer 3

what problem does this change solve?

Well, for one, it helps make it more obvious that there is a possible duplicate. Until now, dupe suggestions were often buried in long comment threads, and easy to overlook. I like this change.

Your excellent high-reputation regulars, even though you don't seem to trust us nowadays, are more than capable of identifying a true duplicate and closing it in short order.

Maybe, but many other users are not. The impulse to answer is stronger than the impulse to dupe-vote, and any education about a possible dupe is a good thing in my book.

I say give this feature a chance; increasing the threshold so the banner is displayed only after the second close vote would be an option, though.

Consider this situation:

Bob casts dupe close-vote on X with destination Y.

That would be massive abuse and should result in serious moderator consequences; I agree it should be possible for the community to roll back the banner, though. The most obvious way for this would be the ability to cast pre-emptive close votes.

Answer 4

Before the "close as duplicate" behavior we all know and love was introduced, there was a semi-standard practice among those of us closing duplicates: edit in a link at the top when you vote to close.

This was nice, primarily because that way you could be sure a link existed (the system didn't do any enforcement, so a lot duplicates at one time didn't have any links to the "original", or if they did they were in comments).

It also had the advantage of putting the link front and center: if you were the author of the question, or were thinking about answering it, you really couldn't miss it.

This latter advantage is finally captured by the new behavior.

What the new behavior doesn't capture was the ability of the OP to dispute closure by simply rolling back the edit. This sort of edit is discouraged for closed questions (and there have been several suggestions to make it impossible), but when the edit was made prior to closure it was a pretty powerful way for the asker to make it clear that the question was not a duplicate.

With the behavior that existed before today, the OP could reply publicly to the automatically-generated comment, which was somewhat less emphatic but serviceable. However, there's no way to publicly disagree with a system banner.

The other potential issue I see with this is that the ability to edit in additional duplicate links (or edit out bad ones) is lost. It may be necessary to add explicit support for some sort of modification to these lists, if simply accumulating the various links from close votes does not suffice.

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rm -rf had another idea for enhancing this... Allow the question asker to confirm the duplicate as helpful, and instantly close the question.

...This brought to mind Pekka's suggestion for enhancing the dup-closing UI - almost all of the pieces are now in place:

• Potential duplicates are shown to voters immediately
• The new close dialog has a fairly decent in-place preview functionality, with the ability to also go back and select a different question.

...we just need a button on the former that takes you straight to the latter!

The only thing this doesn't solve is bogus links. There needs to be a way to get rid of them, even if the question is closed, even if other, better links are also included.

Answer 5

I think the key problem in this case is the inability of community members to remove the notice by themselves.

If a community member is given a way to reject what's said in the banner (without even necessarily rejecting the vote itself), the problem will be solved in its entirely.

A user won't be able to simply vote on a reddited question, and have all traffic being redirected to his question of interest, he would, but for a very short time, and we all know you can't CV twice on the same question.

So yeah, the key solution in my eyes is to allow community members to reject the suggested duplicate.

Answer 6

I guess the discrepancy comes from the level of activity on the site. Not all sites get questions closed in a jiffy. Some of them take time. I personally like this feature. Why? Because I participate on smaller sites (Physics and Chemistry). This would be perfect there, and the greater visibility would help root out non-dupes. On these sites, I trust the 3k/500 rep community not to abuse this (besides, it would easily be caught).

If this is a matter of scale, then, for sites like SO and other high-volume sites, let this kick in at 2 or 3 votes (similar to how suggested edit approvals work for different sites). Simple.

The main advantage of this feature is that it prevents answers from being scattered. Many a time I've seen questions closed as dupes which have answers, simple because the answerer didn't pay much attention to the comments. Such posts can't always be merged (merging is when the questions are pretty much identical), and you end up with the answers being scattered. This feature mitigates the problem.

• Ripe for Abuse: you can vote for absolutely anything and get it added to the question in a manner that looks official;

• You get an official-looking sanction for a dup-vote, regardless of the fact that you haven't yet attracted enough agreement to meet the requirements to actually close the thing.

I personally don't see why it looks more official -- this is only because you're used to the old display (and what's wrong with it being official-looking anyway). It just says "This question may already have an answer". A perfectly legit thing to add -- if one user feels that the question is a dupe, it may indeed have some answers there, with a high probability.

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I would ask why so many changes are being applied without community input? And, if you need a non-OCD practical question, what problem does this change solve?

Regarding the changes, again, let me mention that this is SE's way of testing stuff. They may remove a feature if the community doesn't like it. They do this all the time, you've just noticed it for the first time. Most of these changes go unnoticed. So I really wouldn't call them out for not asking the community. Aside from that, they have been consulting a few community members, just not in public (I don't know much about this).

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An afterthought: If the question gets a "leave open" vote in the queue, then no header magic should be applied till the question gets closed. Otherwise, this header will stay for all eternity on a q with a lone CV. Even better, have this/or this in place. Give users a "this is not a dupe" button in the close menu (next to the "exact duplicate" option) that acts as a preemptive reopen vote (or a negative close vote), and removes the banner. Basically, the banner should get removed whenever the system realizes that there is disagreement over it being a dupe.

And removing the banner when there's a reopen vote is just silly. That just creates broken windows, and the folks trying to reopen have to jump through extra hoops (unless they come from the queue)

Answer 7

I believe this banner is very helpful and it is great it is now shown before the question is actually closed - this way users can make use of the answers in the original post even before the question is closed.

Still I think there is a place for error here. As OP states this feature leaves a lot of place for abuse which is definitely not good. Even if there is no abuse, a user may cause this banner to appear by mistake. It happened to me recently that I erroneously marked a question as duplicate. Now I really want to remove my vote but what is more important I want to remove the banner as it is very misleading.

The solution for me is to enable some users(as per the community policy probably users with high enough reputation) to remove the banner. This way the banners will still be helpful, but in case of abuse or error, moderators or experienced users will be able to fix that.