Is it possible to join topics? Due to some errors I have duplicate topics. I’d like to keep the urls but redirect to a common topic.
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Yes. In the topic, hit the wrench icon. Select the posts you want to merge, then move them to an existing topic. It will split them off and leave a link in the original thread. If you move them all, it will automatically close the topic.
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@Heather_Dudley, thank you for the hint. I tried to join two topics using this method and the comments have been moved. But the empty topic remains (as closed). I’d like to get rid of it (except for the redirection, so I’d like to keep the url).
You can keep it closed and you can also archive and/or unlisted it, depending on what you want to do.
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thank you @dax. I see that there are different possibilities to address my question. I can now prevent the duplicate topic from being listed. That’s what I need. But completely removing the duplicate only keeping the url as a redirect to the other topic doesn’t seem possible as far as I see. Is that true? On Wikipedia (not that a discussion forum is wikipedia) it’s possible to create a page, later delete all the content and make it a redirect.
For the benefit of other users of Wikipedia and the MediaWiki software, it is worth explaining that there is no real correspondence between a Wikipedia topic and a Discourse topic. So the joining/merging topics means something very different:
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Wikipedia never explicitly defines a topic within all its policy and procedures, but it sure has a lot of rules about them. Wikipedia uses the concept of a topic in at least three ways:
- a name for an area of knowledge or subject
- a synonym for a Wikipedia article
- a user search term
Whereas a Discourse topic is a collection of posts of which the first has a topic title.
However, a Discourse topic can have a wiki post and be closed to reply posts so it looks more like a unitary Wikipedia article. -
The Wikipedia data structure operates under a namespace for naming all its webpages in its MediaWiki software. NB Wikipedia actually refers to subsets of the overall namespace as namespaces e.g. 0 = Main/Article, 2 = User, etc.
Discourse does not use such namespaces to structure webpage names. -
Wikipedia article titles have to have unique names and must use Topic-specific naming conventions.
Discourse does prevent duplicate topic names by default but this setting can be disabled.
Discourse has no topic-specific naming convention.
Wikipedia handles ambiguous user search terms by two main mechanisms:
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Redirects = links from ambiguous terms to the correct article title i.e. essentially where a primary topic can be determined.
Discourse can have manual links but not a redirect from a deleted topic. -
Disambiguation pages = lists various meanings of a term and links to the articles i.e. essentially where the primary topic does not exist or is difficult to determine.
Discourse has no mechanism for disambiguation of terms in user searches.
Wikipedia is also far more concerned about permanent links to provide a record of article development and to avoid breaking external links to their topics. So Wikipedia automatically leaves a redirect when a page is deleted. The MediaWiki software does this automatically to maintain a history.
Discourse does not have any requirement to keep such a record of deleted topics.
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Thank you for the comparison @Remah!
For my use case one remaining bit is the redirection. I found that that may be possible using permalinks.
Someone else asked a similar question: Redirect Article- possible?
It seems that if I
- move the content of one topic to the other
- delete one topic
- create a redirect for the deleted topics url to the new one
there is a redirect for anonymous users.
Thank you all for the replies! I’ll see what I make out of this for my usecase.
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Bear in mind that permalink redirection only works with incoming links from other sites. Internal links will just break.
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I have an aversion to merging topics because of the impact on sequencing of posts. So I’ve never actually done it.
FYI, I imagine that merging categories could also benefit from a permalink. Although I know that renaming a category creates an automatic redirect.
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Thank you @Remah for pointing to that topic. The term “merge” didn’t come to my mind otherwise I would have found it in the beginning. I could only think of “join”.
it will also be nice to directly merge 2 topics together. instead of manually merging the individual posts. is this possible?
If you select the original post and all the replies with the button select +below you can merge 2 topics without manually select all the replies.
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您好。对于 Discord，我只是 OpenStreetMap Community discourse 实例的用户。我注意到一位管理员加入了两个主题，并且在已关闭的主题上，很清楚发生了什么，但在目标主题上，合并的消息看起来有点奇怪，因为没有迹象表明它们是从另一个帖子合并过来的。如果可能的话（并且知道如何做到这一点），那就太好了。
您好 Mario，欢迎来到 Meta.Discourse。
您上面的两个链接都指向同一个主题。但我确实找到了指向现已关闭的主题的链接。第二个（已关闭的）主题已合并到第一个（目标）主题，帖子按时间顺序排列。流程看起来没问题。
之所以没有反向链接，是因为帖子被移动的原始主题计划在几天后删除。指向一个将不再存在的主题的反向链接没有意义。那会很奇怪。 
但是，当帖子从一个主题移动到另一个主题，并且帖子被移动的原始主题仍然存在时，目标主题将显示一个反向链接到它们被移动的原始主题。
希望这有助于解释其中的区别。