Finding and merging duplicates

Users may describe the same request in different ways. One person asks for dark mode, another for a night theme, and a third wants the app to follow their system appearance setting. Without duplicate detection, these requests remain separate posts with separate vote counts.

FeedLog can match these posts by meaning rather than by keyword. A manager or owner can then merge them into one thread without losing votes.

How similarity detection works

When feedback is created or edited, FeedLog sends its title and body to an embedding model and stores the returned 768-dimensional vector with the post. FeedLog compares these vectors to rank posts by semantic similarity, even when the posts do not share any words.

For example, "Night theme please" and "Dark mode for the dashboard" have no words in common. A keyword search for one would not find the other, but their vectors can still be close enough to rank them together.

Suggestions are rankings, not confirmation of a duplicate. FeedLog returns the closest posts without applying a similarity cutoff. Even when no close match exists, the list still contains the three nearest posts. A manager or owner must decide whether two posts describe the same request.

Semantic suggestions exclude posts without an embedding. FeedLog generates embeddings in the background after a post is saved, so a new post may take a short time to appear in semantic suggestions. Posts created without an AI key, and posts for which embedding generation failed, do not receive an embedding automatically later. They remain available through text search but require a backfill before semantic matching can include them. See Configuring external services for instructions.

Posts already merged into another post are excluded from every suggestion list.

Where suggestions appear

In the submission form

The submit form searches while the user types. Once the title reaches three characters, the Found 3 Similar Posts panel appears below the editor and refreshes shortly after typing stops. If the body already contains text, the panel appears collapsed so it does not cover the editor.

Selecting a suggestion opens the existing post. The user can then vote for that post instead of submitting another copy of the same request.

On the post page

Each post that has not been merged has a Similar Posts card in its sidebar. The card lists the three closest posts, and Expand All Similar Posts shows up to ten. Anyone can see the card, whether signed in or not.

Managers and owners also see a merge icon on each row, allowing them to start a merge directly from the sidebar.

Merging posts

Merging is limited to managers and owners. There are two entry points:

• The merge icon on a row of the Similar Posts card, which offers Merge into current and Merge current into this.
• The post's merge menu, with Merge to this post and Merge this post into…. The dialog initially lists the ten closest posts. Entering text in its search box replaces that list with three matches for the search text.

The merge direction determines which post remains active. Users can continue to vote and comment on that post. The other post displays a link to it.

Choosing the retained post

Prefer the post with the clearest title. It does not have to be the post that was submitted first.

After a merge, the merged post keeps its URL and remains accessible. A This post was merged into banner links to the retained post. The merged post no longer appears in the feedback list, search results, roadmap, or suggestion lists. Users cannot vote or comment on it, and it cannot be deleted until it is unmerged.

The retained post gains a card in its comment timeline for the merged post. The merged post's comments can be loaded from this card. The comments are not copied; they remain attached to the post on which they were written.

Followers of the merged post continue to receive status updates from the retained post. This preserves notifications for the person who submitted the duplicate.

You can merge a post that already contains merged posts; the complete group moves with it. You cannot merge into a post that has itself been merged. FeedLog rejects the operation to prevent a chain of redirects.

How votes are combined

The retained post's vote count becomes the number of distinct people who voted on any post in the merged group. FeedLog does not simply add the two vote counts.

If a post with 17 votes absorbs one with 4, and two people voted on both, the retained post has 19 votes. This applies the same one-person, one-vote rule used elsewhere in FeedLog. Anyone who voted on the merged post also counts as having voted on the retained post and cannot add another vote.

The merged post retains its original vote count. Its votes remain attached to it and are counted separately again if the posts are unmerged.

Unmerging

Open the retained post, find the merged card in its comment timeline, and select Unmerge from its menu.

The merged post becomes a regular post again. It reappears in the feedback list, search results, and roadmap, and users can vote and comment on it. Both vote counts are recalculated immediately. The retained post no longer counts people who voted only on the former duplicate, but it continues to count people who voted on both posts.

Votes and comments remain attached to their original posts throughout the merge, so unmerging does not need to restore or copy them.

After unmerging, the merge card is removed from the timeline and no merge record remains there. Votes cast on the retained post while the merge was active remain on that post.

Without an AI key configured

Degraded, not disabled

On a self-hosted instance without OPENAI_API_KEY, the panels, dialogs, and merge operations described on this page remain available. Only the similarity method changes: FeedLog falls back to trigram text distance over the title and body, comparing character sequences instead of meaning.

Typos and nearly identical phrases can still match. Different wording may not: "Night theme please" and "Dark mode for the dashboard" no longer match each other. The interface does not indicate when text matching misses a semantically similar post.

Adding the key later generates embeddings only for new or subsequently edited posts. Older feedback must be backfilled.