This may be completely 100% niche and therefore not appropriate for a potential feature, but I thought I’d throw it out there and see.
The site setting to disallow duplicate topic titles is great, but we have a few topic titles that are likely and 100% ok to be duplicated. The example for us is requesting a training session for a tool (we run a makerspace). Users have started having to use topics like “Laser checkout request 2” etc in order to post their request.
I’ve disabled the site setting for now, but I like that it incentivizes descriptive topics (and prevents a bunch of topics that simply say “Help” or the like from cropping up.)
For now we’ll actively moderate and re-title topics if they’re not descriptive, but I thought I’d throw it out there to see if a) there’s an option I’m missing that would help or b) its a problem worth solving.
We could use a long running thread and just ask users to reply to it, so I suppose that would be an option too, but I’d rather not force users to go back and untrack the topic to not be notified of future replies on it.
From a UI standpoint, I don’t exactly have a suggestion for how it would work. A “whitelist” of duplicatable topic titles could easily get out of hand.