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While viewing related questions on Meta Super User, I noticed two questions with the same title.

"Super User website applications policy"

Initially I assumed this was a strange coincidence or a bug in the system. But then I realized the two questions were literally exact duplicates.

Same title, author, comments, answers, migration path, top answer, and related posts.

Even the vote counts for comments and answers are similar between both questions.

Strangely, none of the comments on the prior question are linked to any specific users. Each of the profile names is unclickable, as if the comments were somehow made anonymously, or every user had their accounts deleted.

How is it possible for there to be two exact duplicate questions, including duplicate comments and answers?

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  • For whatever reason it was reopened and remigrated to us, then closed as a duplicate. Could be that users got it reopened, then a mod migrated it, then found out it had already been migrated.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 17:43
  • @Mokubai And the one with the broken profile links is a dupe target for several other questions and cannot be deleted without a lot of messing about :/
    – DavidPostill Mod
    Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 17:55
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    I'd strongly suspect that in the early days of migrations that there were some "teething troubles" and the comment profile links were a casualty. After a time migrations got fixed and it was re-migrated to get everything right. Sadly it meant we had two dupes. We can't merge them, as we'd have one question with duplicate answers, nor can we delete the broken one as it has a lot linking to it and it has the accepted answer.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Aug 8, 2017 at 18:18
  • There's even a third copy, now deleted, but with profile links intact.
    – Ben N
    Commented Aug 10, 2017 at 17:04
  • @Mokubai You can close the broken one as a duplicate of the other one.
    – Donald Duck
    Commented Aug 31, 2017 at 14:37

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