For some time now, when asking a question, you may not give it a title that has been used before.

When you do, you get a popup saying:

A question with that title already exists; please be more specific.

I'm curious: what problem does this approach solve, does it actually solve it, and are its negative effects cancelled by the positive ones?

I'm asking because as an editor who hardly ever asks a question, it does me more harm than good. Examples:

  • Wanting to remove tags and buzzwords from a title, leaving me with the error. Probably the reason the OP added them in the first place.
  • Wanting to change a title like "Help my code doesn't work" into something that at least generally covers what's being asked in the question (for example: "Access Denied while trying to read a file"), so later visitors, editors and reviewers can better decide what they're about to read.

At the moment I'm editing such a title, I don't care that it's a duplicate, and I see at least some kind of merit in keeping the question on the site (in other words: at that moment I'm not doing some turd polishing).

So why are we not allowed to enter a title that has been used before?


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    When asking, I'm assuming because it would show a lack of research, although, I agree, as an editor its really annoying. – Sayse Feb 22 '16 at 11:03
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    @Sayse sure, but when asking a question you can also come to the conclusion that you have a similar problem as in the question with the same title, but the latter doesn't solve your problem. Then why shouldn't you be able to submit the same title again? – CodeCaster Feb 22 '16 at 11:06
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    I remember seeing the classic example of dozens of questions titled "Notice: Undefined index", but I can't find it anymore. Maybe it was in a screenshot. But mainly it's because users suck so much at writing titles we have to actively stop them from creating an epidemic of questions with the same, often useless, title. – BoltClock Feb 22 '16 at 11:06
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    @BoltClock then automatically put questions in some kind of review queue when there are more than N questions with the same title, or whatever. The current implementation is annoying and I want to know why. It's not like users will suddenly think of the best title ever after they got this popup. – CodeCaster Feb 22 '16 at 11:07
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    Having lots of questions with the same title probably makes search less useful, given that results show only the title and the first three lines of the post. (Undefined index is popular, but not quite to 'dozens' -- presumably the rest were deleted.) I'm interested to hear the official rationale, though. – Jeffrey Bosboom Feb 22 '16 at 11:30
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    The "why" should be obvious to a programmer, the machine was programmed to not accept duplicate titles. Whether your question is going to inspire a community manager to tell an SE dev to reprogram the machine, well, good luck. I suspect that "it is annoying" won't cut it. – Hans Passant Feb 22 '16 at 11:34
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    @BoltClock: Is it as bad with copy-editing as with original post? Because I think there might be merit in downgrading it to a warning, or completely removing the check for edits, but not for initial posting. – Deduplicator Feb 22 '16 at 13:03
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    The MSE example is "What's wrong with my SQL query" @Bolt. It's obviously not a very good example as it has proper punctuation and capitalisation :-) – Ben Feb 22 '16 at 14:02
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    At the moment I'm editing such a title, I don't care that it's a duplicate. ...Maybe you should? – Heretic Monkey Feb 22 '16 at 14:34
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    @Mike no, it is not my responsibility that "C# $randomtitle" is not a valid title anymore when I want to remove the "C#" tag from it, nor that "Title at least somewhat describing the problem", which inarguably is better than "Why doesn't this code work", also isn't accepted. – CodeCaster Feb 22 '16 at 14:36
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    Does this unique title constraint take into account tags? If I want to solve a problem in Scala that somebody has already solved in Fortran, will I be forbidden from using the same title? – dcsohl Feb 22 '16 at 15:26
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    No, and yes, @dcsohl, unfortunately. – jscs Feb 22 '16 at 18:51
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    @HansPassant some of these draconian policies were put in place when Jeff Atwood was in charge. Now that he's long gone, it's possible that someone in authority can decide that a policy has outlived its usefulness and allow it to be changed. Not that I know if Jeff was personally responsible for this or not, but it's the kind of thing he was into. – Mark Ransom Feb 22 '16 at 23:26
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    The multiple-language nature of this site combined with the problem dcsohl raised makes this highly annoying even for initial questions as well as edits. More generally, it often takes more words than can fit in a reasonable title to distinguish questions about related topics from each other. – dfeuer Feb 23 '16 at 1:16
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    Half the problem here is the universal application of the rule to remove tags from titles. The guideline has been leave them when it is necessary to have an informative title. Unfortunately people do not do well when left to make judgement calls in the absence of an absolute. – AaronLS Feb 23 '16 at 15:17

From the Overmeta, Add title uniqueness to the heuristics for detecting low-quality questions:


A: "we agree", so there will be a strong check on adding new duplicates, including a link to (one of the) pre-existing questions (so you can go and see if that solves the problem)

So it exists to "block low-quality questions".

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    It would be interesting to know what percentage of questions that get shown this modal (on new question and not on edit) and up not being posted. – Artjom B. Feb 22 '16 at 15:39
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    @Artjom you can't draw any conclusions from questions that weren't posted. Someone could have been testing something, or it could have been the push that drove them away from the site ("argh, another red popup") without getting their question answered. What would be interesting is seeing questions where that popup was shown, but which were posted with a different title, as to see how it inspired people to fix their title. – CodeCaster Feb 22 '16 at 15:42
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    Okay, so secondary question: Does it work? Do we have hard evidence unique titles have decreased the number of low-quality questions? – Frédéric Hamidi Feb 22 '16 at 17:08
  • @Fréd that's a good question, but not one I'm wanting to ask. – CodeCaster Feb 23 '16 at 14:32
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    @CodeCaster, I was thinking about that and I don't think it is actually worthy to ask -- the system has been behaving that way for so long that the metrics we had before the change are probably worthless now. Answering it would require disabling unique titles, at least partially, and I don't see that happening. – Frédéric Hamidi Feb 23 '16 at 14:34
  • @Frédéric neither do I... – CodeCaster Feb 23 '16 at 14:35
  • Note that the heuristic may be valid on SO, but not on the whole network: on Code Review for example, it makes sense for several questions to have the same title even though they have a different approach to a same problem. – Morwenn Feb 23 '16 at 14:36
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    if that is what it is supposed to do it fails miserably, what it needs to do is block low quality users asking questions, which this rule fails at miserably as well. – user177800 Feb 24 '16 at 22:51
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    "The goal here is to be proactive about minimizing [...] duplicates, and [...] the best place to start is the existing heuristics for detecting low-quality questions." If this is supposed to solve some kind of duplication, then they need to change the message. The message makes it sound like a technical error or something. It doesn't even try to suggest that the author reads the linked question, it just tells them to change the title. That's pointless. It should say something like "A question already exists with that title. Do the answers to it solve your problem? Please check." instead. – Radiodef Feb 24 '16 at 23:00

In the purest form, two people asking the same question will have the same answer surely? If not, why? What is different? Why is it not a duplicate? How are searchers going to disambiguate between posts in search results?

If "your" question has the same title as another question, IMO there is an obligation on the author/editor to at least hint about what is different about your (presumably newer) question as compared to earlier works.

With this in mind, I would suggest that enforcing unique titles acts as a (rather stern) reminder that the question may already have been answered, and if not then there should be an explaination in the question body as to how/why it doesn't answer the question.

Failing that, just stick an incrementing number on the end? ;)

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    You're confusing title and question here. Two questions with the same title can have wildly varying subjects and outcomes. – CodeCaster Feb 23 '16 at 14:22
  • I'll happily hold my hand up to not reading everything that has been linked - could you provide some examples of titles which would be duplicates but can't be improved upon please? I'm wary that the ones I come up with that can easily be improved (e.g. "Error when printing to console") are straw-manning and just show that I do not understand the problem fully. – kwah Feb 23 '16 at 14:29
  • All this question is asking for, is the rationale behind not allowing duplicate titles to exist on the site. This question has subsequently been answered by myself, because after clicking some links I found the original feature request that made it possible. – CodeCaster Feb 23 '16 at 14:32
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    @CodeCaster The title should effectively summarise the question though. Do you have examples of perfectly valid duplicate titles that can't be disambiguated? – SuperBiasedMan Feb 23 '16 at 14:37
  • No, that goes beyond the scope of this question. – CodeCaster Feb 23 '16 at 14:40
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    The ideal title for each unique question would probably also be unique. The point is, this restriction is preventing the improvement of content from terrible to decent, because it takes too much work for editors to identify a good unique title. – user1919238 Feb 23 '16 at 15:11
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    Take Arqade for example: "How do I shoot a bow?" would be ambiguous without the game tag, and would conflict with questions about totally different games. We get around this sort of problem by making the game title part of the question (rather than just as a tag), so for example: "How do I shoot a bow in Skyrim?" / "How do I shoot a bow in Minecraft?"* etc. – Robotnik Feb 24 '16 at 9:48
  • As a real-world example, "How can I change the difficulty?" (see When should we edit game names out of question titles? And why?) – Robotnik Feb 24 '16 at 9:53
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    For SO specifically, two questions asking how to do the same thing in two different languages could potentially be blocked by this, without being duplicates. – Ben Aaronson Feb 24 '16 at 10:23
  • I can't even begin to count the number of questions I've read whose titles have had absolutely nothing to do with the question's contents... – Cypher Feb 25 '16 at 6:53
  • "Failing that, just stick an incrementing number on the end?" Yeah "code not working 3487" is a great title :) – Lundin Feb 25 '16 at 7:35

i think a benefit of such restriction is to force you to read existing posts and in that way help you to find a suitable answer or make the wording of your question more precise.


It's an attempt to stop users submitting duplicate questions - potentially a poorly-executed one? That's up for debate


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