I’m well aware the forum is getting spammed with duplicate topics, and I don’t really know how to deal with it.
On one hand, keeping the forum clean and all information structured is very helpful, and duplicate topics should be eliminated. But people also experience issues and have a right to information about what’s going on.
Finding the duplicates isn’t straight forward, because people describe the same issue in different ways. Searching for an error message helps a lot, but when people frequently don’t even put it in the topic, and opt for a vague description instead, finding relevant posts becomes difficult.
Although Discourse has quite decent tools to merge topics and messages, merging topics usually doesn’t help a lot. If there is an outage and there are a dozen topics saying “My website is example.com and I’m getting error X, what does it mean?”, then merging all those questions into a single topic doesn’t really provide any new information to anyone.
Automatic post merging isn’t a feature I know of and I don’t see how this could work. Even the duplicate topic warning you get when posting a new topic is 1) imperfect and 2) frequently ignored.
This is most apparent during outages when there are many people with the same issue. Even when there is a notice in the client area, the control panel and a pinned topic in the forum, people still create new topics and ask what’s going on. In the outage communication rules I’m trying to slam down on the spam, but it just takes so much effort.
We could go full StackOverflow here and indiscriminately delete anything that isn’t unique, but that didn’t become a meme because people love that approach.