This is a great feature, but I discovered what to me seems like a horrible flaw. Often, when moving replies to a new topic, there is no existing ideal first post for that topic. So, the moderator writes one. However, if “preserve chronological order after merging” is checked, the earliest post becomes the new top post and your newly-written post introducing the topic/thread gets shoved unceremoniously to the bottom.
I don’t think there’s ever a case where the first post of a topic should be replaced by a merge. Maybe I’m missing something, though, so please at least add a “keep existing topic’s first post” option.
Can you show me an example of where you might want the first post to be replaced?
When merging two topics, I would expect the person doing the merging to select the one they want as “primary” as the target “existing topic”. If it happens that the older topic is that one, chronological order will naturally be preserved. If you choose the newer topic, it seems logical that you’d do that because you want to preserve the topic introduction. Does that… make sense?
I would assume that I would choose the “right one” by using that one as the “existing topic”. If it happens that the topic I’m selecting posts from is older, I’d expect its first post to end up as the first reply to that target topic.
If a merge is done to two basically-complete existing topics, merging so one is after the other makes sense. But that’s kind of a special case. I think chronologically generally makes the most sense.