It sometimes happens that the same user posts exactly the same question twice in a row.
Examples:
- 1 2. user asked twice for the probability of choosing 90% of the colors from a collection of $10^{10}$ balls of $10^7$ different colors
- 1 2. user asked twice for a proof that disjoint polyhedra must lie at positive distance from one another
- 1 2. user asked twice for the LU decomposition of the same 3×4 matrix
- 1 2. user asked twice for clarification of lemma 3 from a certain paper of Arthan
- 1 2, both deleted but visible to 10K users. User asked twice for proofs of the same claim about $2n$ children choosing from sets of $n$ colored balls
- 1 2, second one deleted. user asked twice for a closed form for $\sum {n \choose k}^3$
- 1 2, both deleted. user asked twice for a proof that a certain max-flow problem could be solved with Dijkstra's algorithm
- 1 2. user asked twice for a proof that any problem $A$ in $\mathcal P$ is polytime-reducible to any other problem $B$
It seems to me that the best way to handle these is to flag them for moderator attention, so that the moderators can immediately merge the questions or close or delete the second one. I can vote to close one as a duplicate of the other, but it sometimes takes along while to gather five votes to close, and in that time the following discussion, which should be happening in one place, is split between two. If it is, the moderators could merge the two questions and their answers, which the site members have no way to do, so I think the flag is required anyway.
Sometimes my flags have been accepted, other times rejected. It appears that some moderators see the matter the way I do, but others don't. I would like to hear other members' opinions on this, and if possible I would like a clear statement from the moderators about whether I should raise a flag in this situation.