Keep Followers when Merging Topics

[iacas]

I'd love to request this feature. When we merge two topics, the followers of the merged thread are lost.

This was particularly costly recently because a moderator merged a multi-year-long topic with hundreds of followers the wrong direction - into a new topic with no followers. And now the followers are all gone. He didn't notice for several days so retrieval of the follower information from the database is impractical.

@Lindy, I realize the road map is fairly well set, but is there any place to put these sort of feature requests?

[sudo]

Yeah this would be pretty nice to have, the topic its merged into's notification preference would take president if a user was subscribed to both but had different notification levels (e.g. instant emails etc)

[iacas]

11 minutes ago, ZeroHour said:

Yeah this would be pretty nice to have, the topic its merged into's notification preference would take president if a user was subscribed to both but had different notification levels (e.g. instant emails etc)

Simple: default to the higher notification level.

That's at least not lossy. This loses all follower status/settings/data.

[sudo]

4 minutes ago, iacas said:

Simple: default to the higher notification level.

That's at least not lossy. This loses all follower status/settings/data.

I wouldn't necessarily go higher, say you merge a small topic into a mega topic, the user wants notifications via email for the smaller topic but has deliberately chosen not to get email from the mega topic, the settings on the merged-into topic should take priority. Ideally a notification to say your topic has been merged and these are your new notification settings would be best, that way the users are informed and can change as necessary, even if its not an email notification but a notification menu notification.

[iacas]

21 minutes ago, ZeroHour said:

I wouldn't necessarily go higher, say you merge a small topic into a mega topic, the user wants notifications via email for the smaller topic but has deliberately chosen not to get email from the mega topic, the settings on the merged-into topic should take priority. Ideally a notification to say your topic has been merged and these are your new notification settings would be best, that way the users are informed and can change as necessary, even if its not an email notification but a notification menu notification.

Point is right now it's lossy, and a bunch of solutions are better than just losing the following status.

Make it too complicated to add the feature and there's even less likelihood this hole will be patched/improved.

[sudo]

1 hour ago, iacas said:

Point is right now it's lossy, and a bunch of solutions are better than just losing the following status.

Make it too complicated to add the feature and there's even less likelihood this hole will be patched/improved.

I do agree, its just to do any action of moving subs across will require iterating through all the people subscribed to the thread to be merged and checking if they already have a record in core_notifications for the merge-into thread so if you are going to do it you may as well do it right. Either way I can see why its not in yet as it could be a taxing process depending on the amount of subs.