Feature suggestion time! Would it be possible for there to be a moderator/admin button for ‘merge all these posts’? For when people can’t get their thoughts together and post 6 times in a row on a topic.
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You should definitely read through
I don’t mind a merge function but ideally you want to educate users before this happens – which we kind of already do, so they are ignoring it on your forum… why?
(Note that for new users they are forcibly prevented from posting more than 3 times in the same topic. So this is a behavior you can only see from regular or basic users, not new users.)
I think it’s worth talking to those users via a PM to see what’s up and also adding public moderator statements in topics reminding people how you want things to be on your forum. On some forums this might be OK, right? Depends on the norms and the culture.
That said, I generally do agree with you, it is generally a bad idea to post a lot and maximize the amount of metadata while minimizing actual content. That’s why the per-topic reminder shown in the screenshot above is part of core.
Because they are people and hence imperfect? 
Also, they might be responding via email or similar and do not see the prompt.
I think a moderator tool to merge a set of posts together and annotate it with a statement and/or message the user would be great. Its a gentle way to show good behaviour, it fixes the problem that at this point exists, and it shows others evidence of moderation having happened.
If you see the warning beforehand, then get gently moderated when you ignore it, its a fairly non confrontational way of saying ‘no really, please do this’. There are other tools (like intervening directly with pm’s, banning etc) when behaviour is actively bad, rather than mistaken.
Would need to be a user notification stream message along the lines of your post was edited, which already exists.
Sure thing.
I mean, discourse already gently corrects you. If you hotlink an image, it will download the image and edit your post, which is absolutely fantastic. This is the same sort of thing, gently fixing up an issue and pointing it out for future reference.
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