"Does this answer your question?" Reads as far more sarcastic than "Potential duplicate of…" Actually, the first time I saw it on a question of mine on SE Meta, where I'd failed to correctly search the dupe first, I just deleted the question in a huff. It was two weeks before I realised it was supposed to be the "new friendly" version. FAIL.

@DonaldDuck - As far as I'm aware, the 'blatantly off topic' close reason disappears at about 2 or 3,000 rep, & until you pass that point you can't see close votes at all. I don't have any SE site where I'm in that range to be able to test. A mod might be able to confirm or correct my info.

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/…

I suppose my enthusiasm for a new "get it out of here without closing it out of hand" tool would be tempered by the tumbleweed that I've known meet even the finest questions over there. Maybe pushing more questions there would prompt more answers. I couldn't honestly say if that would be a valid tactic. Personally, I've only ever asked 3 questions over there, 2 got upvotes but no answers.

Anecdotally, I only passed 20k about an hour ago;) - but I didn't know that existed, tyvm. I do agree on the 'golden rule' of course, but my 'final straw' prompt for this question was superuser.com/questions/1494883/… - not in itself an exceptional piece of work, but just one among many that with a little coaxing feels like it could have some validity.

The iOS client, it must be said, doesn't get a lot of love. You still can't search duplicates when flagging, 4 years or so after the first request for its implementation :\

@fixer1234 - for a true 'interwebz' perspective, it should warm the cookies of your heart. There's certainly nothing like warm cookies ;-))

@fixer1234 I would have thought the spam deletion & -8 rep would auto-generate some kind of at least temp ban. I've seen bans posted as banners on user account profiles before now, but maybe that's a 20/25k rep feature. I'm only 18k on this stack.

We could play the "yes it is," "No it isn't" game all day.

Emiley - you will never know if that was the trigger - someone could have answered or edited a question way down the page, which wouldn't pop it to the top for 'newest', only for 'active'.

@JourneymanGeek - nor would I expect you to have to :) Some stacks, though, do seem to have a policy of mass-tidy periodically.

@AndrewT. - sure, you can paste what you like, but it will be stripped. That's the whole point.