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This is something that has been bugging me for a while.

It is not uncommon for the same question to be asked repeatedly. Take this question that was asked today. This question, in one form or another has been asked hundreds, if not thousands of times. Sometimes it will get marked as a duplicate, other times it wont. Absolutely no offense to RedGrittyBrick who answered the question, but Im sure he is well aware this question has been asked countless times as he has been on the platform as long as me, but I doubt he bothered to look up a previous iteration of the question. I dont blame him, as I have ended up answering questions, rather than marking them as duplicates since it can be VERY difficult to find find them. It takes far less time to answer the question then to find the duplicate - assuming you can find it. Heck, I have reanswered questions knowing I have previously answered the question, but couldnt find my own answer!

There really are a lot of duplicate questions that get reanswered repeatedly. There has to be a better way.

One idea, off the top of my head, would be to find these super common duplicates and write a definitive post on them. So when these common questions come in, you can point them to a well written approved post.

Thought? Ideas?

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    Excellent idea. I keep my own stash of links to canonical question/answers that I frequently refer to when closing duplicates. I'll post them in an answer and folks can add any of their own favourites.
    – DavidPostill Mod
    Dec 8, 2019 at 16:43
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    There is also a tag community-faq which is not often used, with 36 questions.
    – DavidPostill Mod
    Dec 8, 2019 at 17:00
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    My way is to google the question or a rephrased version, I find many super user dupes this way.
    – Moab
    Dec 13, 2019 at 16:43
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    How do you usually search for duplicates? Using the search box in Super User itself (ie [ffmpeg] scale2ref is:answer), a site search using a search engine (site:superuser.com scale2ref ffmpeg), or some other method?
    – llogan
    Dec 16, 2019 at 20:18
  • It feels appropriate to cross-link this to the Ask Different equivalent, which may also be useful for research, even if we can't directly close as dupe - apple.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2418/…
    – Tetsujin
    Dec 20, 2019 at 10:54
  • Well Logan, ill tell you what id do..
    – TardisGuy
    May 4, 2021 at 16:11

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