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Recently I marked that many users are commenting

Related Question : Link to the question

on other users questions, which in a way is helpful but somewhat misleading. I've seen that these questions receive close votes because users don't get the difference between related and duplicate.

Some of the scenarios where user commented and question received close votes :-

What happens after death? (Received 2 close votes) - Comment

How does Dvaita philosophy explain Moksha? (User getting confused again)

What is the difference between God and Devi-Devta or are they same? (Again, User Confused)

Stackoverflow already provides a list of Related questions which may not be that accurate but still, we have a list of related questions on the site.

So should we continue posting Related Question links or we should stop as it confuses users?

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  • I say it is ok since it will help future users to read further on the same topic which is related to the current post. but again I am not sure if I consider neatness of the post.
    – Mr_Green
    Jul 11, 2014 at 9:49
  • or maybe modify the comments to "related but not dupe" ?
    – user3459110
    Jul 11, 2014 at 11:10

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I see no reason not to post comments with links to related questions. The "Related" list in the right sidebar is useful, but links curated by users are almost always better.

If users are incorrectly casting close-as-duplicate votes when they shouldn't, it may be helpful, as Awal Garg notes in the comments, to write something like "Related but not duplicate: [link]" rather than "Related: [link]". Of course, users should also stop incorrectly casting close-as-duplicate votes.

If you see a post that is obviously not a duplicate but is still closed as a duplicate, you can flag it for moderator attention and one of us will reopen it if necessary. (If it isn't blatantly obvious that it's not a duplicate, it is probably better to go through the standard reopen-voting procedure.)

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There is a clear difference between related and duplicate. Users confuse because they might be new to the Stack Exchange network. The whole SE network is used to post related questions' links in comments. Even in other SE sites users confuse sometimes but that's not a problem. The problem is users vote to close them as duplicates even if they are not duplicates. So instead of stopping commenting related questions, we should stop voting to close related questions which are not duplicates.

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