A user has asked his question two times, the first one of which I closed.
When editing the open question, I changed the title to the one used in the closed question, and I get this message:
a question with that title already exists; please be more specific.
I chose a different title for the time being, but: is this the intended behaviour?
From the next build, moderators will be able to re-use titles from existing closed posts, for the purpose of merging questions.
This is a somewhat recent change (September of last year):
Add title uniqueness to the heuristics for detecting low-quality questions
balpha confirmed in chat that this check applies to closed questions (as you experienced), but does not apply to deleted questions.
As jadarnel27 said, it is intended behavior, and I would like to add that any question with the same title suggests your question is a dupe of it. A closed question of the same title even more strongly suggests that your question is a dupe or off-topic and will be closed for the same reason. If you think your question is different enough to stay open, change your title to make the difference clear.
