How many of your ideas are duplicates?

Hi @Johnk - I’ll chime-in with our experience.  We definitely do get some duplicates, although I don’t have a specific percentage available.  How many you get will depend a lot on your specific situation, I think.  The larger your total amount of ideas, the more likely it is that you’ll get some duplicates, as it’s a bit harder for members to find an existing idea that’s exactly what they’re looking to post.  Our platform tries to prevent duplicates by doing an auto-fill search during topic creation, but it can of course still happen.  There are a few things that I think you can do, for example:

• When moderating new ideas, invest some effort into checking and finetuning the titles to make sure they’re as easily findable by others as possible
• Make it part of the moderation process to check for duplicates as they come in, preventing a build-up over time
• Consider an archiving process where you periodically move old and outdated ideas into an archive category (they need to converted to another content type first), making it easier for members to find specific and relevant ideas

Just a few thoughts.  I’d love to hear what others have to say as well.  :)

​@Johnk ​@Kenneth R I am currently completing an Idea Exchange Audit where I am going through to update idea titles, pulling out comments that are separate ideas but stuck on what to do about our duplicate ideas. Many times we have users comment on the duplicate ideas and upvote when the merged idea is right there. Any thoughts on how to bet handle this? 

Hi ​@KathrynMCarter 

I’m wondering if it makes sense for you to archive those ideas that are duplicates probably?

Once they are merged, you could archive the duplicated so they won’t have access to comment anymore on it.

It’s probably a lot manual than expected, but it will help avoid bumping up duplicates further.