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I know well the Community bot for putting random unanswered questions to the front page from time to time. A few time ago, I discovered an uncommon role of the bot putting it as the author of a suggested edit (because the actual suggestion came from an anonymous user).

Now I'm wondering under which circumstances the Community bot may be enforcing a "Marked as duplicate" closure?

I flagged this post as a duplicate, which added the usual automated "possible duplicate" comment. I expected this post to go through the usual voting process, unless a human moderator enforces the post closure. However just a few minutes later I saw the post closure has indeed be enforced (no votes, only me and Community mentioned), but by the Community bot and without apparently involving anyone else (does the bot trusts me so much? ;) ).

I also searched this on meta.se, it seems there used to be an answer for this question, but there seems to be some buggy thing going around and the search result links to an unrelated question :( :

Q: What is the process by which a question is marked as duplicate by Community♦?

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    Uh? Read the accepted answer on that MSE question, it explains what's going on.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Aug 14, 2015 at 22:10
  • Indeed, I was expecting that the title shown in the search results would be the same than the title of the linked article, but apparently it is not...
    – WhiteWinterWolf
    Commented Aug 15, 2015 at 14:14

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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When a question has a pending duplicate vote, the asker sees a notice about the proposed duplicate and gets the option to confirm the duplicate by clicking a button marked “That solved my problem!”.

This question may already have an answer here:

If they confirm the duplicate, the question is immediately closed as a duplicate. This closure is an automated process, so the Community user is indicated as the user doing the action. (Why the Community user, rather than the asker? Presumably because it was easier to implement.)

marked as a duplicate by …, Community

For more information, see Can we clarify to the OP that their question is not yet closed and the duplicates are only suggestions?. The screenshots in my answer are stolen from Shog9's answer.

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    Thanks for this explanation, it would have been more natural to me to see the OP user in such case than the Community one since it does not involve an anonymous intervention but a real and identified user, but as you said, I suppose it was easier to implement this way.
    – WhiteWinterWolf
    Commented Aug 15, 2015 at 14:23

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