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Right now, there are two challenges,

which are, as far as I can tell, the exact same challenge. This has happened before, and sparked the following discussion: Closing old question as duplicate of a new one.

[C]losing old challenges as dupes of new challenges should be considered on a post-by-post basis, so a meta discussion is probably appropriate for each.

The old challenge is, well, very old, so it does not exactly suit the modern standards. Notably, it's scored on character count instead of byte count. As far as I can tell, this is the only difference.

Should either of these questions be closed as a duplicate of the other? If so, which one?

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Notably, it's scored on character count instead of byte count. As far as I can tell, this is the only difference.

That was an important distinction when the ethos of the site was still that all answers compete against each other, and it was felt that people were abusing counting by characters to make their own language which used multibyte character sets. But with the current ethos that you compete against other answers in the same language, it becomes an irrelevant distinction.

The only argument I can see in this case for overriding the default presumption that the new question should be closed in favour of the old is that the new question has more answers, but with 16 the old question also does well on that metric. IMO the choice should be between a normal closure of the new question as a dupe or a merge which moves the answers to the new question into the old one.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I think merger is the best option here. I think all solutions are valid in both challenges so nobody loses. \$\endgroup\$
    – Sanchises
    Apr 26, 2019 at 17:02

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