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I keep clicking on related questions and they are closed. Its annoying.

It would be more helpful if it was only related open questions. Or even if they are older related questions with good answers, but most are close for duplicate and have few answers.

So I guess, if they are closed for duplicate, can we not have them in related, since they will be deleted anyway?

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  • Someone could confirm it were completed or declined?
    – Maniero
    Dec 20, 2010 at 15:17

1 Answer 1

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This was marked on Meta Stack Overflow. Anton Geraschenko probably phrased why this is best:

The point of keeping closed questions around (rather than deleting them) is that they might still be relevant. For example, if a question is closed as a duplicate, it might still have phrased the question in a completely different way, and that different phrasing might be very useful to someone. In particular, looking at a related closed question might be just the thing you need to realize that the question you're looking at solves your problem.

To his point, we regularly use the related column to find duplicates that may be of use to a question asker, even if they happen to be closed.

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    In that case the questions should be clearly marked as having been closed. A recent off-topic question of mine was posted because I saw other interview questions in the Related sections of questions that I was reading. It gave the impression that these questions are accepted (and even common) on the site.
    – dotancohen
    Feb 3, 2012 at 23:14
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    @dotancohen This is an on-going problem here, and all I can say is we're trying our best to resolve it, but there are a number of cleanups we still need to finish to remove those types of broken windows. The Stack Exchange UI breaks down in special cases like ours: most of those questions really just need to be deleted, which would remove them from the related list.
    – user8
    Feb 3, 2012 at 23:23
  • I see, thanks Mark. At least I see that there is progress being made in the area. Your work is much appreciated!
    – dotancohen
    Feb 4, 2012 at 15:41

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