I see there are many questions about duplicated QA threads on SO and others...

Wouldn't be better to have system behavior like this?

  • User comes to question which is closed as (exact) duplicate of X
  • User got redirected to X
  • On top of final page there will alert

You have been redirected from question which duplicates this, would you like to see the duplicate?

I think it's quite annoying if user comes to one of the Stack Exchange sites and gets stuck on a question which is duplicating another question, and he can't see all of the answers without clicking on other link.

FAQ related to this is How to handle duplicate questions?.

What do you say?

Chain Duplicates (see @hammar comment)
If there is a chain of duplicated questions (I've never seen them), then it would be better to change message to

Would you like to see duplicated questions whose lead to this original?

and after clicking on that show them a page with the path of duplicated questions (but only the one through which they've come, like a WIKI disambiguation page).

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What about when there's a chain of duplicates? –  hammar Aug 29 '11 at 12:52
@hammar added answer to bottom of question –  Marek Sebera Aug 29 '11 at 12:59
what is reason for downvote? –  Marek Sebera Aug 29 '11 at 13:22
Here on meta, downvotes are also used to indicate that you disagree with a proposal. It doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with your question. –  hammar Aug 29 '11 at 13:25
ah, haven't noticed that. maybe some poll not connected with reputation points would be better, when you still have to go and read whole question. but ok –  Marek Sebera Aug 29 '11 at 13:29
How do you handle questions closed as duplicates of multiple different questions? –  Wooble Aug 29 '11 at 13:40
crossroad or don't redirect if there are multiple questions which are duplicated. but from word 'duplicate' i can't really say it's right that there can be two qustions of which the first one is duplicate without one or both being duplicates of themselves in reverse or completely other question. –  Marek Sebera Aug 29 '11 at 13:44
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2 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

Once questions are merged they should already automatically forward you to the original, since there's really nothing useful left on the merge stump. If a question is simply closed it won't automatically forward, since there could be some useful information still there, or the wording of the question will be different enough from the original that it's valuable from a search/SEO point of view.

I don't think there should be chains of duplicate links. If you see one, please add the link to the terminal (original) question directly into the body of the post.

Also see: Dr. Strangedupe: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Duplication

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Actually, even question is closed like duplicate, it sometimes happens that it, nevertheless, has value due to the comments and answers left.

I don't believe this should be implemented the way you've described. Though, it's good to discuss in general what can we do to reduce the possibility of visiting occasionally "exact dup " page.

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