In a discussion on best practices for responding to posts merged into a master thread, stanigator shares that they’ve merged similar user issues into one topic for engineering convenience and asks for advice on how to best respond to each original poster. nat notes there’s no universal “best practice” but suggests closing old topics and directing users to the merged topic, while also recommending concise titles. beta recommends replying within the merged post, addressing each user’s issue there for clarity and cohesion, then leaving a quick redirect comment in the original threads with a link to the merged topic. stanigator confirms the original topics were already closed and asks whether linking solutions individually in each original thread’s comment section would be useful. They later clarify stanigator that links to the original posts are already preserved in the merged topic. The consensus leans toward centralizing responses in the merged thread while ensuring users are notified via redirects in their original posts.
I merged several posts on seemingly similar problems into one post as follows.
It’s more convenient for engineering to respond with its own dedicated post.
I would like your advice in terms of best (or easiest) practices in terms of responding to each customer in the merged posts, or going back to the links to the original posts and responding there.
Thanks in advance!
Just disclaiming that I don’t think there’s a “best practice” per se, depending on the context, if your intention as moderator is to direct conversation into “Topic X” that has the merged posts, you may choose to close the old topics (disallowing new posts) and add a post that issues related to “X” should go into “Topic X”.
That said, there are many ways to approach this. Topic titles that are more concise can help as well.
Hey Stanigator,
I’ve dealt with this before too. What worked for me was replying in the merged post and mentioning each person’s issue there. That way, everything stays in one place and it’s easier for others to follow.
Then I just go back to the original posts and leave a quick comment with a link to the merged thread, so people know where to look.
Hope that helps!
The old topics were already closed as they merged into the master problem topic. I suppose it would be more useful to link the solutions post to the poster in the comment threads individually after the merge?
The links are available in both already as I merged posts.
