Surprisingly I couldn’t find a good answer to this on meta. The one I found was Duplicate/Should Have Searched flags
What’s the right way for a moderator to mark a topic as duplicate, let the topic author know, and possibly close the topic referring to the right topic?
on my forum, our moderators merge the topic and posts to the existing one. if the first post is identical we don’t move that one, we just close it. either way the topic creator is also pm’d to let them know. i think each forum may have different ways of doing this. we also have system generated topics that can sometimes be duplicates and we close those and merge any reply posts into one.
On replit ask ones that provide additional value we merge into the original. Otherwise we add a staff note and close the topic as a signpost.
Can you show me an example of this from replit? Does the signpost link to the merge/old one?
if you click the wrench below any post you will see an option to leave a staff notice.
Here is one SSL error for web view in new tab - Bug Reports - Replit Ask
The signpost is the duplicate and it links to the original.
just like this. 
the wrench icon is in the … hidden part under a post where the flag and bookmark icon are.
