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As an example, take this question on Programmers. I suggested a possible related question and eventually 5 users closed it as an exact duplicate. I'm not sure if it is a duplicate, but that's not really the problem. I also found two other questions that, when all three are combined, probably answer the questions of the asker. I posted these links in a comment, which also makes them show up in the side bar as a "Linked" question. However, this isn't really that visible. Previously, I would have added all of these links to the box that listed the duplicate that it was closed as - this made all of the helpful questions stand out to not only the asker, but any future visitors.

I'm not sure if this should be a high-rep or a diamond-mod function, but the ability to add links to other questions to the "this question already has an answer here" box should exist for at least some users. Perhaps even limit it to 3-5 questions, so it doesn't become a list of kinda-sorta related questions.

I'm calling this a bug because we lost functionality that we used to have. Perhaps it should be a feature request, given the change in duplicate functionality?

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    I wouldn't say it's a bug. The downside to it being editable, and trusting people not to edit it, is that people would remove it completely. It's more like a system state, it's not something that should be editable by anyone with privileges. – casperOne Mar 11 '13 at 12:07
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    Side note: Closing as a dupe of multiple posts seems to be the one janitorial function that community members can do, but mods can't. – Manishearth Mar 11 '13 at 12:31
  • @Manishearth How do community members do it? If multiple posts are selected as the duplicate, do they all show up in that box? – Thomas Owens Mar 11 '13 at 12:40
  • @ThomasOwens: Yeppers. – Manishearth Mar 11 '13 at 12:42
  • @ThomasOwens - yes. As a regular user you can select a different question instead of agreeing with any of the existing ones. – ChrisF♦ Mar 11 '13 at 12:43
  • That may be part of the problem as well - if people pile onto one possible duplicate instead of looking around and finding other possible duplicates, then only one will be linked to, without a way to update or fix the message template. – Thomas Owens Mar 11 '13 at 12:52
  • You can often find multiple dupes when you go looking, it might be nice to allow users voting to close to put additional questions in there. It would only count as one vote but you could vote to close as a duplicate of several different questions. – ben is uǝq backwards Mar 11 '13 at 13:00
  • @benisuǝqbackwards The same problem arises: what do you do if a question has been closed and then someone finds alternative duplicates? There's currently no way for anyone (high rep user or mod) to add to the list once a question has been closed. There used to be, and that was nice. – Thomas Owens Mar 11 '13 at 13:12
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They should allow Trusted Users (20k+) to be able to modify the Closed as Duplicate links, see the feature-request here.

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