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"Related posts" does not examine links in comments
"Draft loaded. You had edited this before but haven't saved it. We loaded the edits for you." has a bunch of related posts linked in its first comment thread, but the posts don't appear in the sidebar in the special green "Related Posts" box.
Is that intentional, accidental, or just planned-but-not-implemented?
2 answers
Already noted in a comment, but to expand a bit: currently the "related" section shows only questions that have been closed as a duplicate of the current one. We called it "related", not "duplicated by", because this was meant to be a first step. In particular, we've heard the feedback that people want to see what questions are closed as a duplicate of the current one to help in curating -- for example, if you're making a major edit, you want to either make sure it's still a duplicate or reopen the now-not-duplicates, depending. So we started with that type of related link, with the idea that there would be more later.
One approach would be to automatically detect links on the page and "promote" them to the "related" section. An alternate idea I'd like to explore is making this an intentional list. People might link to all sorts of things, especially in comments -- that doesn't mean they're related to the question. Rather than possibly overwhelming the section with not-really-related links, can we come up with a way for people to add links to that section explicitly? I'm imagining some scheme where anyone (or almost anyone) can suggest a link, and people with some ability to be determined can approve or reject suggestions. The ability doesn't need to be as "heavyweight" as reviewing edits or closing questions; maybe "participate everywhere" is enough, particularly if editors and curators can remove links, or maybe we can add a new ability.
My personal preferences[1] to get a discussion going:
Always link to the question
If there is a link to a question, to an answer, or to a comment under that question or one of its answers, the Related Posts should list the question (not the answer or comment).
Always link both ways
Any time a question lists another question in its Related Posts, the other question should also list the first.
Detect links in questions, answers, and comments
Related Posts should detect links in the question, in its answers, and in any comments on the question or its answers.
Any other considerations?
Manual override
Should there be a way for curators or moderators to remove items from the Related Posts? Should other users be able to flag to request this? Should removing a post automatically remove the link in the other direction (from the target post back to this one)?
Prioritisation
Should the location of a link (whether it is found in the question, answer, question comments, or answer comments) affect its priority? This may affect the order in which Related Posts are displayed, and potentially which ones to display in cases where there are too many to display them all.
Concerns
Are any of my suggestions likely to cause problems? Should there be any exceptions or safeguards?
Realism
These are my thoughts on what might be useful. I understand that some aspects may not be realistic to implement. Of those that are, I understand that the Related Posts are unlikely to update in real time. Having posts show up in the list a day later still seems very useful.
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Note that these are suggestions in addition to the current behaviour, which is explained in ArtOfCode's comment under the question:
It's neither of those - at the moment the Related Posts feature only displays duplicates.
I'm not proposing removing that. ↩︎
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