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Some of the posts I requested in this post got merged, and now I can only see 404 pages. When the question is merged, can we redirect the original question to the new one automatically?

Related: Automatically Redirect on Merged/Migrated Questions, but I don't think migrated question should be redirected, this is only needed for merged questions because there is no way to retrieve the new page.

Shog9 also suggested to do redirection of Merged questions here: When merging questions, leave the duplicate one as a placeholder

Also related to Redirect links to moved questions, but the meaning of moved could be many others, like deleted, those do not need to redirect.

Almost exact duplicate here (with the title, but content says deleted questions also, but I think deleted questions shouldn't be redirected): Why do migrated questions lack redirection via HTTP response status code 301 (Moved Permanently)?. Or is there an easy way to find out where the questions were migrated?

And I believe, now people encourging merging duplicate questions instead of deleting, so this would happen more from now on. And I am putting a bounty to get more attention.

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2 Answers 2

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Previously this was impossible, as one of the merged questions (the source) was literally destroyed. A merge record is recorded in the history of the target question, but it's not in any kind of reasonably queryable format.

We now handle question merging in a much more sane way -- both questions are retained, one is a stub, and all answers are migrated into the merged question. If the stub is deleted, we 301 redirect to the merge target.

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/improved-question-merging/

Nothing can be done about old merges, sadly, due to our poor choice to destroy the other question in the merge

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    literally destroy?!, oh, thats sound hopeless to add redirection to new one. The one I am worrying about is broken links on google, stackoverflow itself, and on meta.
    – YOU
    Commented May 25, 2010 at 11:27
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    Accepting this, but if you could keep history of old question before merged, that would be great.
    – YOU
    Commented May 31, 2010 at 0:27
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I wonder if there is a way to give out a badges for people who do lots of merges or vote a lot for migration (where the migration happens subsequently). That would encourage good behaviour, but that's the whole purpose of badges, yes?

Of course, these would only be open to people with high rep. So what?

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    1) Migrating and Merging is different case actually. 2) Merging can only be done by diamond moderators. 3) Migrated questions are no problem with current design, IMHO. My Point is that once the question is merged with another, only answers can be merge (thats fine), original questions is lost, and there is no way to find out where it is merged, so requesting it to redirect it automatically, instead of displaying 404 page.
    – YOU
    Commented May 25, 2010 at 8:33
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    And Badges are not related to merging or migration, I don't see any badges for those at the moment.
    – YOU
    Commented May 25, 2010 at 8:44

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