Dealing with duplicate ideas?

KrisKing

Hi everyone,

This question has come up on several calls recently and I thought I'd get the pulse how our client communities are handling this today.

When you receive two similar or identical ideas how to you go about dealing with this?

Genevieve P

This happens every week in our Community.

We have a small moderation team so usually I catch the duplicates as they come in (since I've read through all the other 1,000+ ideas and usually recognize when I've seen one before).

Steps I take:

• Leave the current post as Unresolved so it's easy to find in my list
• Search for possible duplicates (sometimes I find multiple duplicates that have slipped through the cracks)
• Use the BUMP feature to put the original idea(s) to the top of the Ideas page
• Check the boxes on my post in the Unresolved list and the newly bumped posts in the Product Ideas list
• Merge ideas, using the oldest one as the Parent idea.

If there's only been one vote, I don't use the "Redirect" feature as it still leaves the duplicate post in our list. However if there have been multiple votes by the time I've found the duplicate, I check the "Redirect" notice so that if anyone has bookmarked it or copied the URL it will take them to the right place.

In the last quarter we merged over 150 duplicate ideas. I'm hopeful that this will slow down as fewer ideas come in (and more ideas are Voted on / commented on instead).

Is this what you meant?

Cheers,
Genevieve

Genevieve P

This happens every week in our Community.

We have a small moderation team so usually I catch the duplicates as they come in (since I've read through all the other 1,000+ ideas and usually recognize when I've seen one before).

Steps I take:

• Leave the current post as Unresolved so it's easy to find in my list
• Search for possible duplicates (sometimes I find multiple duplicates that have slipped through the cracks)
• Use the BUMP feature to put the original idea(s) to the top of the Ideas page
• Check the boxes on my post in the Unresolved list and the newly bumped posts in the Product Ideas list
• Merge ideas, using the oldest one as the Parent idea.

If there's only been one vote, I don't use the "Redirect" feature as it still leaves the duplicate post in our list. However if there have been multiple votes by the time I've found the duplicate, I check the "Redirect" notice so that if anyone has bookmarked it or copied the URL it will take them to the right place.

In the last quarter we merged over 150 duplicate ideas. I'm hopeful that this will slow down as fewer ideas come in (and more ideas are Voted on / commented on instead).

Is this what you meant?

Cheers,
Genevieve

KrisKing

Hi @Genevieve P ,

This is exactly what I was hoping for!

Glad to hear you have a system in place and this sounds like a solid solution to, what could be, a difficult situation.

Thanks for your answer,

Kris

Genevieve P

No problem! 🙂

I will say, this is only possible because of the way that Votes are merged: it takes into account unique votes. So if two Ideas are out there, each with 5 votes, but it's the same people on both Ideas, then merging them still only has 5 votes. If they're unique people on each idea, then it would have a total of 10 votes after merging.

I will say it's not ideal as it requires only one person to manage the queue and somehow remember all previous ideas.

My ideal would be to easily export all Ideas into a CSV so we can do analysis on the text, instead of using API and other workarounds.

Cheers,
Genevieve