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When someone votes to close a question as a duplicate, they provide a link to the potential duplicate and the system auto-generated a "possible duplicate of ..." comment.

Users who can't yet vote to close can flag the question as a duplicate instead. They also provide the link to the possible duplicate, but there's no auto-generated comment in that case. I think there should be - it would allow others (especially those with enough rep to vote to close) to avoid having to hunt down the link.

It might also be a good idea to include this question as an option in the close-as-duplicate dialog.

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  • 3
    Agree. This would also allow the community to close questions before the moderators got around to assessing the flags, taking some of the load off them and preventing problems like this one.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented May 25, 2011 at 4:57
  • I just had the idea to propose this myself. Good that I searched before :-)
    – Paŭlo Ebermann
    Commented Sep 18, 2011 at 22:38
  • Doesn't the system provide you the link when you click Close?
    – Engineer2021
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 0:42
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    @0A0D When you vote to close, yes. When you flag, no.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 1:46
  • @Anna: Who can flag to Close? I have never seen that. If you are at least 3K or higher, you can vote to Close and you see the link. In 10K tools, you can flag or disagree but there is no flagging an exact duplicate option.
    – Engineer2021
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 11:13
  • that's a good suggestion. Maybe in addition, the flag to close as duplicate could be automatically deleted if the question already got closed by the community afterwards
    – Tobias Kienzler
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 11:27
  • 5
    @0A0D: All users which don't yet have the vote-to-close rights (but have flag rights) instead have the same dialog with a "flag" button, reachable from the flag dialog. (You can try it on any SE site where you don't yet have the close dialog.)
    – Paŭlo Ebermann
    Commented Sep 23, 2011 at 13:33
  • Yeah, I agree, this sounds weird. I've even created an account here, on meta, to say that I find myself posting a comment each time I flag a question as a duplicate. Autocommenting seems to be an obviously useful thing to do.
    – kirelagin
    Commented Jun 2, 2013 at 9:21
  • Did this just get implemented? Just now I saw this on one of the meta questions - I've never seen this on one of my own flags on the main SO site.
    – Qantas 94 Heavy
    Commented Jun 13, 2013 at 10:26
  • @Qantas94Heavy The new changes aren't deployed on SO yet, but yes, this is implemented now.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Jun 13, 2013 at 14:06

1 Answer 1

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I've seen posts in the Close Votes review queue that seem to have 0 votes to close but still have a suggested duplicate. I suspect this means that flags to close do put it in the queue and convey the choice to reviewers. If so, this issue isn't quite as important since the information is shared with the likely voters; if not, adding that feature would be helpful.

Regardless, only adding the comment in one case but not the other is an inconsistency that should be fixed. People that come across the question directly don't get any indication of the close request even if it is recorded in the review queue.

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    Yeah, it's shared with the other voters - but not with the author, who really might be the one to benefit the most from it.
    – Shog9
    Commented Sep 25, 2012 at 2:31
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    It's also only reaching those votes who visit /review, possibly leaving out some who would just see the question organically.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Sep 25, 2012 at 2:36

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