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Feature request: When a question is closed as a duplicate (or merged into another), the author of that question should be able to comment on the parent question and its answers, irrespective of reputation.

Primary reason: low rep users are probably more likely to ask questions that have already been asked before and also more likely to not have the skills necessary to adapt the answers to the parent to their situation, the latter is needed since even if the questions are duplicates within the required epsilon, the answers to the parent might not be quite what the new poster is looking for and might need a little tweaking.

Secondary reason: having a question closed as a duplicate is not a bad thing, but this consequence (of not being able to comment) can mean that the user doesn't get the help that they need and which the community could very easily give. So it would be a more welcoming gesture to enable them to comment on the parent.

(I accept that this might be impractical - it would mean that parent questions needed to know their children.)

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    about being impractical: The process of closing the duplicate question would need to make the duplicate's owner a sort of co-owner of the parent question... then the question wouldn't need to know about its children, but only about its multiple co-owners [I agree this doesn't reduce complexity by much, depending on how ownership is realized in the SE database] – Jonas Heidelberg Feb 21 '12 at 22:23
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When a question is closed as a duplicate (or merged into another), the author of that question should be able to comment on the parent question and its answers, irrespective of reputation

Per the FAQ this is already possible, and has been for years; users with 1 rep can always comment on their own posts, their own questions, and any answers to their questions.

It's other people's questions and posts that 1 rep users can't comment on, until they earn 50 rep.

edit: I see, I misunderstood, this is about being able to comment on the duplicate question when you are the owner of the other duplicate. I agree with Tim Stone in the comments:

Seems like it'd be entirely too complicated, though, for a privilege that isn't terribly hard to get.

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  • I don't think anything needs to be changed here, but I think the request here was that when User B posts Question B which is closed as a dupe of Question A, posted by User A... that User B can comment on Question A, by virtue of Question B being closed as a dupe of A. I may have just confused things further, though! – Andrew Barber Feb 22 '12 at 2:49
  • I think this feature request is about allowing low reputation users to comment on answers to a post they don't own, when that post is a question that the low reputation user's own question was closed as a duplicate of. Seems like it'd be entirely too complicated, though, for a privilege that isn't terribly hard to get. – Tim Stone Feb 22 '12 at 2:50
  • @TimStone You said what I should have said, much better than I did :P – Andrew Barber Feb 22 '12 at 2:56
  • @tim ah, I see, "the author of the duplicate question should be able to comment on the other question. – Jeff Atwood Feb 22 '12 at 2:56

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