Could we check the duplicated topic title for the each category only?

Support
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First of all, I would like to say “thank you very much” to the Discourse team. You had a great, smart and interesting forum. We are using the Discourse as a platform for our website :smiley: Then we have one case that needs your help.
Currently, the Discourse doesn’t allow users to create 2 topics which have the same topic title although they are in different categories. So do we have any solutions for this validation applied for the unique category, not across the system?
Example:
User A created a topic with the topic title “Discourse is a great system” in the category 1
=> User B can NOT create a topic with the title “Discourse is a great system” in the category 1 but he CAN do it in the category 2

I hope to see your answer soon. Thanks once again.

3 Likes
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Glad to hear Discourse is working well for your website :smiley:

If you want to allow topics to have duplicate titles, you can enable the allow duplicate topic titles site setting. In general though, we recommend keeping it disabled, as having duplicate titles can be confusing for users and potentially search engines.

Unfortunately we don’t have that functionality, it is just on or off across the whole system.

1 Like
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Just to amplify on what @david said, if you look at the way the URL is constructed, the category is not part of the URL:

https://example.com/t/topic-title/1234

so if there were duplicate titles in two different categories the URLs would be confusingly close together – other than the id number of course.

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@david and @codinghorror Thank you very much for your support.
The reason why I would like to check the duplicate titles for each category, not all. Because on our system, all categories are private and each category will match to one group. So the condition for viewing, searching the topic in a category is that he needs to be a member of a group matching the category.
If we check the duplicate topic title and users don’t see the topic that has the same title in the category (on our system, it works as a community). It makes the users confused.
Currently, our temporary solution is to “allow duplicate topic titles” on the setting. But if our website is bigger, allowing the duplicate topic title is not good.

2 Likes
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I agree that it should be possible to have the same title if the category is different. This would be huge benefit.

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Would this be difficult to implement?

The scenario is, that a user doesn’t have access to all categories. Receiving a failure that the title of this topic is already used is confusing if the topic title was used in a category at which the user doesn’t have access to it.

Therfore it would be great to have a three state:
No duplicate title
No duplicate title in same category
Allow duplicate category

1 Like
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How to proceed with https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/10034 ?

@minh_tri_Phan YI: This was merged today.