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I came across a user with low rep but a gold famous question badge and was curious. It seems his question (the only one he has) was marked as a duplicate of the actual famous question.

This seems to be some kind of loophole.

Steps (this is by no means an encouragement to do the same):

  1. find a famous question
  2. make a new question asking essentially the same thing
  3. get your question marked as a duplicate of the famous question
  4. get a nice shiny gold badge

Is this intentional?

Besides good ethics/morals, whats stopping anyone from doing this exact same thing to get undeserved badges?


Edit: This is not as severe as I thought. The question in question actually does have enough views to be a famous question though it may be entirely due to the fact that it was marked as a duplicate to a famous and well rated question. By chance or not, I suppose this sort of this is most likely frowned upon but not reversed.

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  • Don't view it as a flaw, view it as an enhancement ^^ (Evil laugh). BTW Do the user that creates the duplicate have to wait for the views to start accumulating or does it give the badge automatically. Feb 12, 2013 at 19:38
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    PLease at least link to the question! Feb 12, 2013 at 19:43
  • @JorgeCastro: Didn't want to point the finger. I will flag it though.
    – Enigma
    Feb 12, 2013 at 19:48
  • It's not a big deal, the big win is finding high traffic duplicates and duping them properly. Feb 12, 2013 at 19:49
  • Ironically, perhaps, is that you were one of the ones who marked it as a dupe.
    – Enigma
    Feb 12, 2013 at 19:51
  • Yeah the autoforwarding is a newish feature, there are still tons of older questions like that though, flag em as you find them. Feb 12, 2013 at 20:15
  • Who cares about badges?
    – Tachyons
    Feb 13, 2013 at 14:25
  • People who don't have a nice set of them perhaps.
    – Enigma
    Feb 13, 2013 at 16:02
  • Hmm, what's wrong with this question to deserve so many downvotes? Feb 15, 2013 at 20:07

1 Answer 1

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If a question is a duplicate it automatically gets forwarded to the master question, I don't think this increases the view count; unless there are answers posted, in which case you can flag to either have those removed, or (if they're good) flag and ask for a merge so all the traffic is going to the master question.

If the person is getting a bunch of views then it's an indication that the question either has a search term or something that the master question does not, so they should be merged/duped for the sake of the user's finding the canonical question.

I don't think anyone does this intentionally, the onus is on the community to keep the duplicate chain maintained, and if using a badge to find these works then do so. We should be using the famous question badges to see which questions need to be maintained anyway.

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