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In the past, before we had the current closure notes the community user edited in the possible duplicates inside the text of the question, once the question got closed. See for example here.

Today some of these posts were bumped to the front page by edits, and I decided to get rid of the legacy messages. After a few edits it dawned on me that I effectively removed the only trace to the duplicate target by doing so. Which made me scramble to rollback those edits.

I was wondering if there is a way to bring these posts up to date. One way I could think of is re-opening and then closing them, to make the closure banner include the duplicate target, but this feels kind of cumbersome. While there is a bit of a shortcut, for those holding a golden tag badge, see for example here.

Are there any other suggestions?

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    Seems to me that if we were to adjust this, it should probably be done using an automated process (to avoid bumps and tons of work) plus perhaps exception handling when the duplicate message has been edited. It shouldn't be hard to write a script to do this.
    – Erik A
    Nov 1, 2019 at 17:45
  • @ErikReinstateMonicA I think that has been said before, and Shog's response has been that there was too high a risk of things going south. So I dont think that will be implemented. Also I don't think whe should set out to find all old closed duplicates and edit them, more something that we edit when it gets bumped by a burnination etc.
    – Luuklag
    Nov 1, 2019 at 19:41
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    So, there's two problems, @Luuklag: 1) we currently avoid showing two duplicate notices based on a fixed time (the point at which we stopped relying on automated edits) to determine whether to display the system notice. 2) we can't automatically remove 100% of the edited-in notices that were created prior to that date. We could probably get most of them, but since we can't get all of them... We'd be showing double notices on some % of posts - therefore, we can't edit them without either showing double notices or not showing notices at all.
    – Shog9
    Nov 2, 2019 at 0:31
  • @Shog9 thanks for taking the time to reply, really appreciate it. I think it might be worthwile to have some SEDE magician try to build a query to see how many, non-deleted posts show the Possible Duplicate part at the start of the post, followed by a hyperlink, compared to how many posts are closed as duplicates before the introduction of the full duplicate notice. That will give us an idea of how large the % without post notice would become.
    – Luuklag
    Nov 2, 2019 at 10:08

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