I do think this is a major flaw in the duplicate system on Stack Exchange. It's good enough for us because we know what a duplicate is. But for non-users, they're not necessarily going to notice the "possible duplicate" banner, nor know they should follow it.
There are a few manual options without having to get SE to redesign things:
- Mods can merge.
We can merge things so that if you visit the old URL, you're redirected to the new one. One danger in this is we lose traffic over time as the ranking is earnt for the duplicate.
- SEO the main question
People are landing on the duplicate because it best satisfies their search. If we can pull the key phrases over onto the master question, this might make that one gain ranking and search-traffic.
But that may come at the cost of quality. Nobody likes a dump of SEO text.
- Add bigger signage to the duplicate
This is probably the least offensive. We "deface" the duplicate post so that it better shows users that they should be clicking through to see another page. It's not going to work for everybody - but it may work for some.
I'm thinking a big blockquote, big header, bold text, link to the duplicate along the lines of:
#This post is a duplicate of another on Ask Ubuntu To view the original question and its answers, please use the following link:
Ideally, it would be nice if the auto-text was similarly clear.
I'm not sure how viable those options are, I'm just putting them out there. Discuss!
