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The other day, I submitted this question about Tzedaka collectors. It was marked as a duplicate of this other question.

The linked question, however, had no answer. I understand the basic idea that the first question asked remains and mine is a duplicate. However, I see a few problems:

  • How do people know which question to answer? Yes, I know that they can't answer mine because it's "closed". But, then again, no one answered the 1st question either.
  • When people do answer the original (1st) question, I get no notification of that fact, whereas, if my question stayed, of course, I would know about the answers.

So, is there a good, "fair" solution to this scenario? Maybe there's a way to suggest that in such a scenario where there was no answer and my question duplicates, a message suggestion placing a bounty on the 1st question would raise awareness?

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    Getting alerted to answers posted to questions your question is a duplicate of is a very interesting idea.
    – Double AA Mod
    Commented Jan 22, 2015 at 4:28
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    If I would have had the option to, I would have marked the duplicate the other way. You're around to appreciate the answers to your question and mark an answer as accepted; the guy who asked the other question has deleted his account.
    – MTL
    Commented Jan 22, 2015 at 17:02

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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If @Shokhet is correct, this seems like an obvious solution. If the original questioner has deleted his account, why not move or merge comments (if possible) to the newer person's question? Furthermore, rather than marking the new question as a duplicate, I think you should even delete the old question altogether. The writer is no longer active, the question had no answer. In a way, it's a "widow".

Note - even though I am mentioning my question, I think this should be M.Y. policy any time this situation occurs. It may have already, but, I understand that it would require research to investigate all such scenarios, and I think the request should be done by the 2nd (newer) questioner.

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  • But questions aren't only here for the user that asked the question -- they're helpful to a lot of people who use the website, later; and also useful to people who don't use the site, but will find answers to their questions through a search engine. And anyway, duplicates are useful in certain ways, so it might not pay to delete it. So my +1 on this answer is to mark the duplicate the other way, and not to delete the question, not in the case of a duplicate, and not ever.
    – MTL
    Commented Jan 29, 2015 at 0:53

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