Today's update completes another top-rated UserVoice request -- making it easier to explicitly link duplicate questions together.
There are lots of small improvements that go with this build. We now show the current close vote count in the close menu, so you have some idea why the other 3k+ rep users think this question should be closed:
Remember, it takes 5 close votes from 3,000+ reputation users to close a question, but they don't all have to agree on the reason. (The reason with the most votes, however, will be shown when the question is finally closed. Yes yes, I know, you're programmers so you are immediately wondering what happens if all five votes are for five different reasons. Stop that right now!)
If you select "exact duplicate" as a reason, you'll get a dynamic as-you-type question duplicate lookup. You can match on any word in the title, or the actual question id number here.
If the question reaches the 5 vote close threshold, and has enough duplicate votes, it will be closed with the reason of "exact duplicate", as before. But now a revision will be automatically edited into the post, summarizing the voted duplicate questions at the top:
We tried to look at the existing way the community was dealing with duplicate questions and streamline it into as few steps as possible.
Remember, in some cases we may want duplicate questions to stick around ...
There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds our fellow programmers can find the answer they’re looking for.
... but if not, feel free to flag for moderator attention any closed duplicates you think should be merged. If the moderator agrees, he or she can merge the duplicates together without any loss of answers or comments.