As your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community becomes more active, Admins and Moderators might find it necessary to merge two posts or to create a discussion from a comment that is better suited to being a standalone topic.
The functionality of the Split / Merge addon simplifies these tasks, and you can "split" and "merge" the following post types:
- Discussions
- Questions & answers
- Ideas
The "split" and "merge" processes are the same for these various post types.
📝 NOTE: When merging ideas, the votes from the merged ideas will be combined. However, if a user has voted for more than one of the merged ideas, only one of those votes will be counted in the merged idea.
Enable the addon
📝 NOTE: The Split / Merge addon is available on all plan levels.
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings > Addons > Addons.
- Click the toggle to slide it to the right.
The "split" and "merge" functionalities are enabled for your Vanilla community.
Required permissions
In order for users to be able to use the "split" and "merge" functionalities, they must belong to a Role that has the following permissions.
- When these permissions are granted in Default Category Permissions, users automatically have the split-merge ability for all Categories.
- Alternatively, you can limit the breadth of these abilities by granting permission to select users, per Category, for your various Categories.
- ✔️ TIP: To learn how to access and manage your Roles and their permissions, see Roles & Permissions.
Split a post
The following permissions are required for a user to split a comment from its current post and, with it, create a new post:
Comments > Delete for the category that the comment is being split from andDiscussions > Add for the category that the new post is being created in.
Merge a post
The following permissions are required for a user to merge one post with another (as a comment in the "receiving" post):
Discussions > Delete for the category that the post is in andComments > Add for the category that houses the post it will be merged with.
Merge discussions
📝 NOTE: The Merge feature is now compatible with the Foundation Layout -- as well as the Modern Layout and Table Layout -- for discussion pages.
There are a variety of reasons why you'd want to merge discussions. For example, merging two discussions that are similar reduces duplicate content and solidifies engagement into a single discussion.
Before we begin...
The ability to multi-select posts and comments must be enabled for your Vanilla community before you can merge discussions.
To check this:
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings > Posts > Posting.
- Make sure that the Enable checkboxes on posts and comments setting is toggled ON.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save.
Steps
1. On the main Posts (formerly "Discussions") page, select two or more posts that you want to merge by checking their boxes.
2. A message appears in the bottom left of the screen and indicates the number of posts that have been selected; click the Merge option.
3. A popup lists the posts that you selected. On the popup:
- Select which post to merge the other post (or posts) into (i.e., which post will "host" all of the content).
- Optionally, check the Leave a redirect link box if you want to provide redirect links in the merged post's original location to the new location.
4. Click Merge to complete the action.
Merge posts on different pages
You can merge posts that are located on different pages. In the video below, the bottom-left menu remains until you've found all the posts you want to merge.
📝 NOTE: This works only if performed in the same window/tab; you cannot merge posts in different windows/tabs.
Split a comment from a post
Many posts garner dozens of comments, some of which might be off topic or even better suited to being a distinct topic for discussion. If so, you can use the Split feature to break these comments out of their associated posts and into their own thread.
To split a comment from its post:
1. Click into the post that contains the comment that you want to split.
2. Click the checkboxes to select one or more comments that you want to split out to a distinct post thread. (This example splits one comment.)
3. A message appears in the bottom left of the screen and indicates the number of comments that have been selected; click the Split option.
4. On the popup that displays, specify a title for the new post, and click the dropdowns to choose: a Category, a post type (Discussion, Poll, Question, Idea), and an author.
5. Click Split.
How splitting and merging affect analytics
When merging posts, it's important to note that this action merges only the original post and comments, not page views.
If you have two posts listed in the 'Advanced Analytics' tab of your Dashboard under Discussions With Most Views, and you decide to merge them, then you can expect to see both posts still listed as separate data-points in that display module. This is to maintain an accurate count of page views.
In this scenario, clicking on either from that module will link to the same post, unless you opted to not create a redirect link, in which case, the 'merged' post will serve a 'Page Not Found' message.
The reverse can be expected when splitting a post: when a post is split, only the "original" post keeps the page views; the post created from the split will be treated as a new post.
