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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.
    – Luis Alvarado
    Commented Feb 12, 2013 at 19:38
  • 5
    PLease at least link to the question!
    – Jorge Castro
    Commented Feb 12, 2013 at 19:43
  • @JorgeCastro: Didn't want to point the finger. I will flag it though.
    – Status3543
    Commented Feb 12, 2013 at 19:48
  • It's not a big deal, the big win is finding high traffic duplicates and duping them properly.
    – Jorge Castro
    Commented Feb 12, 2013 at 19:49
  • Ironically, perhaps, is that you were one of the ones who marked it as a dupe.
    – Status3543
    Commented 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.
    – Jorge Castro
    Commented Feb 12, 2013 at 20:15
  • Who cares about badges?
    – Tachyons
    Commented Feb 13, 2013 at 14:25
  • People who don't have a nice set of them perhaps.
    – Status3543
    Commented Feb 13, 2013 at 16:02
  • Hmm, what's wrong with this question to deserve so many downvotes?
    – 0xC0000022L
    Commented Feb 15, 2013 at 20:07

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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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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