As moderators and forum members, we’re bound to the forum software that we have, both with its features and limitations. It would be a very, very, very heavy lift to do something drastic like change it.
Yes, when duplicate topics get merged, the votes do not get added up. I just found four duplicate topics today and had to close three of them, each with 6-8 votes. Let’s assume nobody voted twice: If everybody had searched, that topic would have 27 votes today instead of the 8 that it has.
Because votes can’t be merged, when we merge topics, the winning topic is the one that has the most votes. It’s not always the first thread. Some people don’t like having their topics closed, especially if they were the first ones and did their due diligence by searching, and their thread gets closed out in favor of someone who didn’t.
We do want a single item per topic, going forward. This was documented in a recent Community post. Imagine that somebody posts a wishlist of five things that they really want to see. Then somebody else posts a wishlist of five other things they want but three of them overlap with the first post. Do you merge them? Do you merge a third topic into the first one that covers just one of those topics? What if a forum member sees one of these posts and really wants one of the items but doesn’t want the other four…do they vote for it? What if Asobo implements three of the five items in one of the wishlist? Do we close it? This is why we want one issue per topic.
So, this is my long way of saying, the best things we can do right now are:
- Search before creating a new topic. Remember to search on a few terms.
- Flag topics that you think are dupes. Choose “Something else” and provide links to the duplicate topic(s). If you’re not a Member yet, send a private message to “moderators” with the duplicate topics.
- Catch duplicate topics quickly before they go too far.