I’ve seen many people posted duplicate issues which can be easily searched on google, this forum, or the Help Center. This bloats the InfinityFree Forum with unnecessary posts. I think this forum needs moderations and enforcements to reduce duplicate posts to make this forum cleaner.
I think there’s an option in Discourse for the system to automatically merge posts - I don’t know, but there probably is
There is the ability to merge posts, however, there are currently only 2 mods, and the Admin. Also, it would be quite a lot of work to merge all of those 
Merging is good, but I think duplicate posts also needs to be prevented in the first place.
In Cloudflare’s Forum they don’t allow 2 of the same titles in a forum category.
I’m well aware the forum is getting spammed with duplicate topics, and I don’t really know how to deal with it.
On one hand, keeping the forum clean and all information structured is very helpful, and duplicate topics should be eliminated. But people also experience issues and have a right to information about what’s going on.
Finding the duplicates isn’t straight forward, because people describe the same issue in different ways. Searching for an error message helps a lot, but when people frequently don’t even put it in the topic, and opt for a vague description instead, finding relevant posts becomes difficult.
Although Discourse has quite decent tools to merge topics and messages, merging topics usually doesn’t help a lot. If there is an outage and there are a dozen topics saying “My website is example.com and I’m getting error X, what does it mean?”, then merging all those questions into a single topic doesn’t really provide any new information to anyone.
Automatic post merging isn’t a feature I know of and I don’t see how this could work. Even the duplicate topic warning you get when posting a new topic is 1) imperfect and 2) frequently ignored.
This is most apparent during outages when there are many people with the same issue. Even when there is a notice in the client area, the control panel and a pinned topic in the forum, people still create new topics and ask what’s going on. In the outage communication rules I’m trying to slam down on the spam, but it just takes so much effort.
We could go full StackOverflow here and indiscriminately delete anything that isn’t unique, but that didn’t become a meme because people love that approach.
2 Likes
First of all … This is NOT important
there are far more important issues, than complaining about
someone posting a problem, that was similar to someone elses problem.
Youve made that mistake yourself.
Yes, it is. Proper communication is important. Especially during outages, people want information and clarity.
“Just don’t have outages then” is not a helpful reply. They do happen, and you often don’t have control over them. The widespread panic, confusion and chaos is something that can be mitigated.
What “mistake” are you accusing me of exactly?
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 15 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.