Merge posts

How to get there: Click All Posts in the sidebar, open the duplicate post, click the More (⋯) menu, then choose Merge.

Merging takes a duplicate post and folds it into the canonical one. All the engagement on the duplicate (votes, followers, comments) moves over to the target, and anyone visiting the old URL is redirected.

How merging works

The Merge screen shows the post you are merging from at the top and a search box for the target post. Search by title, pick the target, and confirm.

  • Votes move to the target. Voters who had already voted on the target are deduplicated, so no single user counts twice. Vote counts on the target go up by the number of newly migrated voters; the source's vote count drops to zero.
  • Followers move to the target, also deduplicated. Anyone already following the target stays as a single follower.
  • Comments move to the target. The original conversation thread is preserved in chronological order alongside the target's existing comments. No comment history is lost.
  • The source post is kept as a redirect. Visitors landing on the old URL are sent to the target post with a 301 redirect and a message ("This post has been merged."). Bookmarks and old emails keep working.
  • A short comment is added to the target ("Merged with [source title]."), so the trail is visible.

When to merge

  • Exact duplicates. Two customers asked for the same thing in slightly different words.
  • Variants of the same idea. Several posts that all boil down to one underlying feature request. Merge the smaller ones into the most articulate one.
  • Clean-up after a campaign. A launch or a survey can produce a burst of similar requests. Merging consolidates the signal into one prioritisable post.

Before merging, consider marking the source as Duplicate of the target using the Linked Posts panel. It gives you a paper trail and a chance to think twice. See Link posts and inline post mentions.

Merging with Nova

You can also ask Nova to find and merge duplicates for you. Prompts like "are there duplicates of post ABC123?" surface the ranked candidates; Nova will only run the merge after you confirm with an explicit "yes" or "merge them", so the same irreversibility guard applies.

Reversibility

Merging is not reversible. Once you confirm, the source post is redirected and its votes, followers, and comments belong to the target. Review the target post carefully before confirming.

If you merged the wrong way around (the smaller post was actually the canonical one), the cleanest fix is to leave the merge in place and rename the target. Splitting back out via Split posts is possible but does not restore the original comment thread.