Until this is implemented UserVoice is really just a joke.

Well, I came here to suggest the feature but found this feature which actually needs the suggested feature. It is a recursive feature. I really hope this feature will finally be getting the attention it surely needs. I suggest features to many products using uservoice and see this exact problem of divide and miss in almost every feature I'd like to suggest.

The root cause for the problem is that the search for features is lacking in quality. It is hard to find and match to a suggested feature in the first place. The search box is a great idea, the returned list of possible previous suggested features not so much. This is one of those places where AI (NLP, Context, sentiment, summarizing) might shine! And this same AI might help an admin to suggest possible merges as well.

UserVoice would be great if it had a way to edit/suggest editions by other users. I've been using UserVoice (as user) for MS products for a long while, and the thing I notice the most is: there are repeated ideas, a lot of them, always. Sometimes because it's hard to find new ideas, sometimes because they are indeed different at some point.

For the second case, an edit / suggest edits feature could be of great value, so several users could aggregate multiple details into a single feature request. Also, the statistics of the 'most requested' features would be more realistic, as one feature will more likely be one feature with several votes, instead of several duplicate/similar features with just a few votes.

This is an outrage! There are three instances of this same request!

The status of the suggestion, "Bulk merge multiple ideas",
Recommended on Oct 17, 2014, https://feedback.uservoice.com/forums/1-general-feedback/suggestions/6575334-bulk-merge-multiple-ideas, was completed on March 1, 2017, however we, the users, still have no ability to merge or recommend merger of similar or same ideas. This problem is so pervasive that even in this forum, moderated by UserVoice itself, there are three instances of this same suggestion that have not been merged in over four years.

Our voice for change is being diminished! Divided, we are less effective at expressing our intent. UserVoice, you are discouraging and disabling us from achieving the very thing that you promise to do.

UserVoice, you must create a process for uniting the votes for similar or same feature requests, by moderator or by the users, or else you are not living up to your purpose and mission.

This will be useful even here: look at this https://feedback.uservoice.com/forums/1-general-feedback/suggestions/3511892-allow-users-to-suggest-duplicate-items

This will be useful even here: look at this https://feedback.uservoice.com/forums/1-product-management/suggestions/2563333-give-users-a-way-to-flag-ideas-that-should-be-merg and https://feedback.uservoice.com/forums/1-product-management/suggestions/7276617-flag-highlight-ideas-that-may-need-to-be-merged

This is essential for large community management.

This is simply a must have to crowdsource management of large pools of ideas

Really desired for all the companies that use and rely on your product to allow for users to suggest merging of ideas. Admins typically don't have the time.

When we (as users of a product) are going to vote for a feature, we find multiple ideas/suggestion, we want to let the admin to merge them, please provide a simple method

The existing UserVoice system for feedback is dysfunctional. In very large communities with international customers, you end up with many "new ideas" that say the same thing (because people don't know how to search), and within those ideas, many describe what they need very poorly. This makes it very hard to track voting and gain traction. Due to community size, it can also be very hard for the feedback forum monitors to actively manage this.

I think this problem should be resolvable by the community itself. GitHub supports PRs to merge code into one code base - UserVoice should crowdsource this issue by adding support for CRs (convergence requests, for lack of a better name -- feel free to choose another) to allow community members to indicate when one "new idea" should be merged into another, and the idea author can approve it, automatically transferring over upvotes and auto-forwarding URI lookups of the idea that was merged to the URI of the idea that supercedes it. This would allow users to cleanup existing content and drive it forward together without having to get the forum moderators involved. It would also allow moderators to discover duplicates based on community input, and if someone wasn't approving a merge that should be done, a moderator could step in and approve it.

If this doesn't clearly describe the need or if you have questions, please don't hesitate to reach out in the comments.

I just left feedback about a feature request that I now see is a duplicate of this post...So yes, this exactly.

In terms of end-user experience, it can be a very frustrating experience and I feel overwhelmed when seeing five different suggestions for the same thing or nearly the same thing. Furthermore, they might already be tied together on the backend as related but the user has no idea. I don't know which one I should vote for, and I feel like I end up wasting a lot of time trying to find the specific search parameters that most closely relate to my idea and have the highest vote count. At the end of the day I feel like I'm wasting too much time just to get my ideas/votes across that I feel like won't ever be heard if theyre already scattered across 5 different posts instead of one post with a combined vote count.

I've seen other posts about this but it appears that only admins have control. For most of the places i've seen it, theres normally very few admins. It would be great if us users could help with the consolidation process by tagging similar posts inside threads.

For example, say I tried finding a post about what should be displayed upon first run. I found a few post about the same thing. I didn't know which to vote on as wasn't sure if the admin was good about consolidating. I would love to be able to tag those similar post together which could either then show up so users could get to the others if they only came across one allowing them to vote on the highest one or it could send a message to the admin saying user123 said these posts are the same topic. I feel like the users are more likely to find the duplicates.

I was looking through the Windows Phone suggestions in the Messaging category. There are at least two ideas that are getting voted on for the same idea. Facebook chat integration doesn't let you send messages to offline contacts. One has 222 votes the other has 115 votes. It would be cool if there was a way the users could vote to merge the two ideas and combine or pool the votes.