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Today if a topic has the same title inSided doesn’t allow for this to be posted, you have to alter the title. Given that the location of the content is often unique, would prefer to have the system allow for duplicate titles.

Places where this becomes annoying:

  • Introduction categories - where new joiners need to creatively think up a new title each time rather than us being able to standardize these so they contain something like their role, city/location
  • Communications that we need to post across multiple groups. In these cases we’re sharing the same information with each group generally, but mindlessly need to adjust the title each time.

Hi @Scott Baldwin! The reason why we are currently not allowing topics with the same title to be published is to avoid confusion for end-users when they’re searching for content, as unique titles should signal unique content piece. A secondary reason would be to not affect SEO scoring by having duplicated content in multiple places. For the second point you raised, have you considered featuring one content piece in multiple groups? If yes, could you share with me why that was not addressing your need? 

I’ll open this idea to gather some more insights and use cases from the community. Thank you!

Updated idea statusNew→Open

@Cristina not sure those are critical reasons for that limitation. Search would then allow them to see all content that matches and the SEO impacts here aren’t substantial especially given how content is ranked in search engines on more than one factor. You could also handle these issues with SEO index/noindex and follow/nofollow on posts if it was a critical exception to manage.

Featuring content works in some cases, but in others it’s not the right way for the content to appear. It’s not something that needs to be called out and featured, it just needs to be available in multiple places.

You’re raising good points to consider, thanks! I’m still struggling a bit to pinpoint strong advantages of allowing same title topics to be published and how they might weigh against potential risks.

I feel we’re tapping into a discussion around community and content strategies, so I’d like to involve @Julian in this thread to hear his take on this. 

Interesting case, thanks for sharing. While I am not totally against this idea, I do understand why there are some concerns...

I get that e.g. for “introduce yourself”-categories, this is somewhat of a limitation. Also for these more generic content pieces that you want to have in each group. Nevertheless, to my knowledge this is not a very common issue across our communities. At least this is not a topic that I hear Community Managers bring up in conversations. But I do get that it is mildly annoying having to come up with different titles!

How I solved this on the inSpired community: I chose titles that are similar, but include the category name, e.g.: What to find in Analytics & Reporting

Thinking about the average content on a community, I must agree that this has the potential to hinder the findability of information. I am already struggling figuring out which topic I should visit first when the topic titles in search results are quite similar.

From a Community Mangement point-of-view, this could also result in more workload for the Moderation team: I have a feeling that it could invite users to create topics with less meaningful titles, forcing the Moderation team to update more topic titles than usual.

I wonder how Community Managers of larger communities are looking at this, maybe @bjoern_schulze could share his two cents once he is back from holiday?

I could see two ways that could be a healthy compromise:

  1. Allow duplicate titles when content is being created in the Control environment.
  2. Have a feature to allow or deny duplicate titles in the category / group settings

I feel like this could reduce the potential negative impact while enabling you to decide yourself if / where you want to allow duplicate titles.

I’m a bit surprised because my experience (and expectation) is that inSided doesn’t disallow more than one topic with the same title. I’ve just checked it on my community by copying and pasting an existing title (which is being used very often by our users, btw.) and I could publish it easily.

  1. Copy the title “Kündigung”
  2. Create a new topic
  3. Paste the title
  4. Put anything in to the text editor
  5. Choose a private (testing) category to publish the topic
  6. Publish

I also found examples of existing topics sharing the very same titles, e.g.:

I’m happy to share more details with the inSided support team.

In general, not allowing multiple topics to have the same title would lead to user inconveniences in a large support community. We get questions like “Cancel contract” or “Renew contract” on a regular basis. Forcing users to guess which version of a “Cancel contract” title hasn’t been used yet (like “Cancel contract please”, “Cancel contract now”, “Cancel contract 123”) would lead to frustration.

We do however at times change existing title in the moderation process as soon as we know more details (e.g.”Cancel mobile contract”, “Cancel DSL contract”), to make it more user and SEO friendly, but that’s not always possible.

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