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The ability to merge community posts

Not Planned


Posted Jun 24, 2010

Pretty self explanatory.  The ability to merge forum posts, especially in feature requests, the same question or idea gets posted multiple time.  The ability to merge these would be very valuable.


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64 comments

Agree -- I am trying to consolidate feature requests (where multiple users essentially requested the same thing), so the comment threads are integrated - and voters only see the feature request once (so the votes aren't spread around variants of the same idea).

 

Right now - I don't see any way to do this :-(   (Other than to delete a topic, and painstakingly cut and paste its contents into another).

Merge tickets works great.  So why not extend this to forums?

1


Yes, we could REALLY use a smartly designed feature request merge functionality. One that would allow you to combine the original requests, the comment threads, and the vote totals. It would obviously take some manual work to merge the comment threads in an intelligible way. 

Here's one simple way of doing it. It's not pretty, but it would allow us to keep our feature request forum much more compact.

Before Merge


Request1

Comment1a

Comment1b

Comment1c

etc...

5 votes


Request 2

Comment2a

Comment2b

Comment2c

etc...

7 votes


After Merge:


Request1

Comment1a

Comment1b

Comment1c

Request2

Comment2a

Comment2b

Comment2c

12 votes


 

0


adding my +1 to this request. Ability to merge tickets is crucial, not just for ideas, but for questions as well. It's pretty disappointing that this feature has not yet been implemented.

1


Dealing with duplicates is taking up quite a lot of time for us as we try to keep the forum tidy. This would make it so much easier as currently we're leaving comments asking people to add their vote to the topic posted prior to theirs instead.  

1


We definitely need this as well.  We are actively using our feature request forum and it's getting quite large. having multiple posts with their own "me too" votes will make it difficult to prioritize these requests.  

0


This is also crucial for us to keep our forums tidy

0


I think there's another topic about this somewhere (*ahem* the irony!) so apologies I've not commented here. 

What we'll probably do to address the problem of duplication is actually not merge topics. The problem with merging is that it assumes complete contextual parity. That assumption completely breaks down when we take comment streams into consideration; imagine two conversations going on at exactly the same time by completely different people - it becomes impossible to follow, right?

What we'll likely do instead is give you the ability to say this topic is a duplicate, and then point that duplicate topic to the correct and original topic. By doing so, the topic closes to all comments and edits, and a visual cue is added to the topic so reader understand it's a duplicate and that they can go to this topic: [link]

What's unknown for me at the moment is what we do about search results. Initially I think we thought we should just straight remove duplicates from search indexing. However, everyone searches differently, which means a customer may search for something (a word, a string) that was previously in your forums but is now removed from search results because it was a duplicate, not find it and then create a new topic about the exact same thing you marked as a duplicate. Vicious circle ensues. 

Anyway, we plan on adding this sort of functionality in 2012, it unfortunately won't be possible this side of the year.

-1


Hope you guys move forward with this. It would help even if it were to direct the duplicate to an original post.

Thanks

0


This approach would work for us.  At least it allows us to close down one thread, and properly redirect people.  Even if search took you to the closed topic -- you'd see the link to move forward with the conversation.

If you have a nice visual way of showing that a forum topic is 'closed' and redirecting to a new topic to continue the conversation, people would quickly understand the protocols and not be confused.

 

Perhaps an email notification to subscribe to the new topic (if they were formally subscribed.)

0


Indeed, this feature is very useful, either the "merge topics" or the "Mark as duplicate" that Jake suggested

Btw, you could use it yourself for this case for instance ;-) http://screencast.com/t/oTbv9iS3x  and ar 2 votes to this threat from that one, hehe.

 

I would go for "Mark as duplicate" and perhaps would keep the topics separated so comments make sense as Jake mentioned. I would just add "automagically" any vote on the duplicate to the original topic.

0


this "mark as a duplicate" idea sounds like a great feature.  Looking forward to seeing if this rolls out in 2012.  hopefully the first half.

0


This is a must have for us to migrate completely to ZenDesk - any time-frame - please, please, pretty please?!

0


Any update on this?

0


Any update on this yet? I'm surprised this one is still not done. This is very common with other Idea/Feature Request software. I can see the problem of merging the comments, so what Jake suggested with the marking as a duplicate and linking would suffice (and would be WAY better than not being able to do it). Please get this one done! :-)

0


Guys, we are re-building the web portal as I write this.  We will look into this functionality when we tackle the community features of the new web portal.

0


Hi Pierre, any update on the timing?  It's been about 7 months since the last comment.  This is such a critical functionality for us and we are keenly interested.

0


Same here. I am trying to clean up our many forum posts - and so many of them ought to be consolidated.  We want the same 'merge' feature that's available for tickets. Bringing all the comments together in one place.   (And consolidating whatever votes the topic already has).  Right now there's no way to combine things and keep all the 'me toos' accurate.

0


Agreed! Is this still really planned? We would absolutely love love love the ability to merge topics. We just can't count on our users to search first and post later. Thank you!

0


I would love to have this feature as well! It looks like we have tons of feature requests but many of them are duplicates!

0


Agreed +1 for this feature. It's something that's severely lacking from current forum functionality :)

0


Still waiting for this. I just came across 12 seperate threads in our forums relating to exactly the same bug in the game. The answer should not be to respond to every single one of these separately directing them to one thread and then close them. That's an administrative nightmare. Our staff can't even keep track of which of these topics is the "one".

0


Good to see it's still planned, though!

0


After a merge, both requests should stay intact. However, one of them should get all the votes and voting should be closed on the other, while refering users to the other "open to votes" request.

I really hope Ideas get more priority and first class citizenship in Help Center going forward. Your key competitors have this already.

0


Honestly, the only thing our customers care about is that their vote counts. If all of the comments get deleted but the votes are added up, that's what matters. 

0


In our case, the comments in each topic really are relevant, and we'd like to see them brought together as well.  In feature request forums, we not only are interested in their votes, but are interested in their suggestions as to how they want that feature implemented.

Unfortunately, sometimes we have two different topics in a forum that are on the same subject.   We want the ability to make it easier for our users so they don't have to read two separate threads, and be unsure where to vote.  (Imagine if there was a second post in this forum about merging forum topics.   Would you want to lose all the discussion here if you merged this into another one?   

We'd sure like to see this sooner than later.  It would allow us to clean up our forums and make them far more useful for users (because once you get a lot of topics in a forum - people stop searching, and just post things that are already there as new topics.  :-(

0


I'm with you on that Larry, 100% It's absolutely vital for our business where our players need to be able to find the information they're looking for in minutes, rather than scrounging through all the forums and duplicating threads.

0


+1

0


yes, would like to have this one!

0


The moderator says the mark as duplicate feature was to be added in 2012. Where is it?!

0


Would also like to see this added in, please!

 

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