Review Audit failed when "late answer" answer is a duplicate

Question

I just got a review audit where the "late answer" was a duplicate of the accepted answer, but flagging it on that basis failed the review. That seems like a bug to me.

Question here: Is it better to call a function that doesn't have an effect at that point, IF it improves code clarity?

I found that by clicking the question to view the entire Q&A, and noticed that the copy was from a generic "user12345" account (probably with 1 rep as well) and the original from a real-looking account. Viewing the whole Q&A is often useful when reviewing, especially late answers (which are often repeats of earlier points, disagreements with those, or random addendums better submitted as edits). I looked at the duplicate and thought "weird, rep harvesting maybe?" so I clicked "needs moderator attention" and wrote "copy and paste of accepted answer". FAIL!

I think that this review type can't ever work, because to avoid the problem I found you'd need to make up whole new "late answers" which by definition the review bot can't know anything useful about. Either that or to pass you'd just need to take any action at all, including upvoting the original of the duplicated answer. Which I didn't do, BTW, because I had no idea or opinion about the question or answer.

(this is not a duplicate of "What are review tests", it predates that and focuses on a particular defect within the process. See the comments below).

Answer 1

The post in the audit was the accepted answer. You flagged that answer itself — not a duplicate answer, since in all likelihood no such duplicate was ever posted — and, of course, if it had been a live review flagging a good accepted answer like that would have been quite wrong.

How can this be? Well, audits will deliberately fake post details so you can't tell if a post has been accepted or upvoted, or who wrote it, in order to avoid making audits absolutely trivial: you have to look at the contents. But this means that naive attempts to suss out duplicate answers will get you in trouble when simply not looking for duplicates may not.

But all is not lost: if you pay attention to where you land on the page when you click the link to the right of the answer in review, you can always tell. The link given will always scroll you to that particular post; if it leaves you at the top of the page, you know it's been deleted (and is therefore a known-bad audit), and if it takes you to an upvoted answer unexpectedly, you know that that's the real deal and that the review is a known-good audit.

P.S. Looking for duplicate answers is very helpful, so please do keep doing that, just make sure to look at all the information available so you don't run into audits.

Answer 2

I got a similar problem while reviewing a first-question audit. It had excellent quality and even contained a link to comments on the question. I followed that link and so found the origin from that audit, with different user name and many votes. I thought: Hmm… Someone is trying to get reputation here by getting votes for a copied question. So I flagged the audit as spam and failed.

IMO it should be easy to discern these audits from real duplicates/spam and I find it tedious to click on the tiny "link" in the side bar to check the original question.