Allowing some topics titles to be duplicated

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The discussion revolves around the possibility of allowing some topic titles to be duplicated. wreality proposes the idea as their makerspace community often needs to create multiple topics for training session requests, resulting in uninformative titles like “Laser checkout request 2”. The current site setting to disallow duplicate topic titles is generally beneficial, but in this specific case, it might be better to make an exception. codinghorror suggests using a single checkout topic where users can reply to request a laser checkout, or creating a laser category with unique topic titles. wreality considers this a viable solution and notes that they usually retitle topics with the date and time once a session is scheduled, which might be why they haven’t encountered this issue before.

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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.

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Why not have a single checkout topic, and people reply to it as they check out the laser? Or have a laser category and people create new topics there using their name or the date in the topic title?

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Its an idea, and that’s probably why we haven’t run into it before (we usually retitle topics once a session is scheduled with the date and time). In fact, this is probably the best option and why we haven’t seen this issue before. :slight_smile: