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> **Possible Duplicate:**  
> [Possible to remove the link to duplicate question?](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/50336/possible-to-remove-the-link-to-duplicate-question)  

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Some old posts have this text at the top of the Markdown. I read a bit on the history, and Shog announced this behavior stopped with changes to the system in 2013:

[R]ather than editing in the banner, it's generated as-needed and displayed separately above the question

I'm not able to find much recent information about this, so I'm just wondering what happens if I remove the banner. Does it make a "real" duplicate banner appear? Will it still be closed as a duplicate?

Should I remove it or is there some benefit to keeping it there?

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    No, do not remove it just like that. A diamond or gold hammer should first reopen and re-close the question as duplicate again. I have gold hammer on support, discussion, and feature request tags so feel free to send me list of such questions and I'll do it. (Either in comments here or in chat, see my profile for link to my chat room on MSE.)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 22:16
  • On second thought, you can list the questions here, and anyone with diamond or gold hammer can then do it.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 22:17
  • @ShadowWizard I replaced the one example that I had (that you ruined) with a link to an SEDE query that finds all the results. Let's see you ruin that result set :)
    – Laurel
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 22:24
  • Well, way too many to handle ourselves, the only way would be some auto script, as I suggested here: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/181915/…
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jul 2, 2016 at 3:43

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You should leave it alone. The new duplicate banner only applies to questions which were closed after the date/time the feature was implemented. Old questions are still reliant on the banner and it should remain a part of the post until such time that it gets reopened. Removing the banner itself does not reopen the question - it just leaves it in a confusing state where users can't immediately find the duplicate question when viewing it, which leads to a poor user experience.

As Shadow Wizard mentions, if you have a gold tag badge for the tag, you can instantly reopen and close it again to make the new banner appear and get rid of the old one, but you should not waste your time going through a list of questions doing this. Do it for very popular questions that you run across naturally. There are tens of thousands of such duplicate questions across the network, and reopening and reclosing them all just to use the new banner is simply not worth the effort.

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