Duplicated reason of a duplicate choice

Question

When flagging the question, these options are presented to me:

I am flagging to report this question as...

• spam

  Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation.

• rude or abusive

  A reasonable person would find this content inappropriate for respectful discourse.

• should be closed...

  This question is completely unclear, incomplete, overly-broad, primarily opinion-based or is not about Drupal as described in the help center, and it is unlikely to be fixed via editing.

• a duplicate...

  This question has been asked before and already has an answer.

• in need of moderator intervention

  A problem not listed above that requires action by a moderator. Be specific and detailed!

When I'm choosing should be closed..., it's showing again the same option as in the previous page, which is:

• duplicate of...

  This question has been asked before and already has an answer.

Is this a simple alias, or a bug?

Is there any difference between choosing one of another, or it's basically the same thing?

Answer 1

You get your privilege to flag way earlier than you get privilege to vote close. This means there need to be entry in flag list for it - so folks can flag even without access to vote menu.

If you will try to cast duplicate flag when you already have a vote to close privilege, flag will be automatically converted to vote. Probably it won't even get listed in your flag history. Entry is not removed from flag menu because (that's my guess) people who just got voting to close privilege may still have a habit to look for it in flags, so why developers should invest more work in making things harder?