Merge or Unmerge Ideas

Overview

As a community grows, members naturally submit duplicate or closely related ideas. The Merge and Unmerge feature allows moderators to keep the workspace clean and focused by consolidating related feedback into a single, authoritative Parent idea.
Merging and Unmerging ideas can be done only from Idea Portfolio.

This feature fully preserves user engagement—combining votes, comments, and attachments into the master idea—while remaining completely reversible. If a merge needs to be undone, moderators can unmerge the ideas to restore their exact original states.

Core Definitions

• Parent Idea: The primary, master idea that receives all data and remains active for community interaction.
• Child Idea: The duplicate or related idea whose content is absorbed into the parent. Once merged, it becomes a read-only that redirects users to the parent.
  
  

Permissions

To execute these actions, moderators must have explicit authorization:

• To Merge: The user performing the action must be an assigned admin or moderator on the designated parent idea as well as on each child idea included in the merge.
• To Unmerge: The user must have corresponding admin or moderator permissions on both the parent and child ideas being separated. Standard community members cannot see or initiate the unmerge action from read-only child idea pages.

How to Merge an Idea

Merging ideas is only available when the workspace has the Idea Duplicate Detection tool enabled. This tool is enabled by default for all workspaces. If it is not active in your workspace, please contact Support or your Account Manager to have it enabled.

Steps to Merge an Idea:

1. Click the idea title that has potential duplicates to open the side panel.
2. Review and compare the ideas, then designate which will be the Parent idea and which will be the Child idea.
3. Click the Merge button to complete the merge.

How to Unmerge an Idea

Steps to Merge an Idea:

1. Click the idea title to open the side panel.
2. Click the Unmerge button to complete the process. 

Contents Transferred during Merge

When a child idea is merged into a parent, data flows into the parent idea according to specific consolidation rules to ensure no historical context or engagement is lost. 

Here is a list of contents that gets transferred during the Merge:

1. Vote: All unique votes move to the parent. If a community member voted on both the parent and the child, their child vote is discarded to prevent double-counting.
2. Comments & Replies: All the comments and the replies moves to the parent. The exact internal thread structure and timestamps are preserved.
3. Super-comments: All the super comments moves to the parent and appended to the end of the parent’s existing super-comment sequence.
4. File Attachments: Files originally uploaded to the child idea are automatically re-associated with the parent.
5. Labels & Tags: Any labels or tags present on the child are applied to the parent (if they weren't there already).
6. Linked Ideas: Any external ideas linked to the child are updated to link directly to the parent.
7. Co-submitters & Idea Owners: Child Co-submitters and idea owners are added to the parent's list of Co-submitters/ Idea owners so credit is maintained.

Rules and Constraints

To maintain data integrity and prevent system loops, several strict guardrails are in place:

• Visibility and Access to Merge/Unmerge Ideas: The ideas can be merged / unmerged only from Idea Portfolio. The merged ideas will display in the parent idea on the Idea details page as well as in Idea Portfolio.
• Stage Restrictions: Both the parent and child ideas must be in an interactive stage (e.g., Review or Refine). Ideas that are in recycle bin, reserve stage cannot be merged.
• Labeled Ideas: Ideas marked as Selected or Implemented cannot be merged as Child ideas. They always remain at a higher level in the hierarchy and can only serve as Parent ideas.
• No Multi-Layer Nesting: An idea cannot be part of a chain reaction. A parent cannot be a child of another idea, and a child cannot bring its own active child ideas with it. The system requires a flat structure; you must unmerge or flatten existing groups before merging up.
• Merge Idea Limits: A moderator can merge a maximum of 10 child ideas into a parent in a single operation.
• Workspace & Community Boundaries: Ideas cannot be merged across different communities. Additionally, if data classification is enabled, a child idea cannot have a security/classification level higher than the parent idea or the parent campaign's ceiling.
• Concurrency Protection: To avoid database conflicts, an idea cannot be involved in two simultaneous merge or unmerge operations.
• No "Partial" Unmerging: Unmerging is an all-or-nothing action. You cannot selectively pull a subset of data or just one child out of a multi-idea merge at this time.

Effects of Merging an Idea

Understanding the impact of a merge on the end-user experience and system behavior is critical for smooth community management.

• Notifications: No email or in-app notifications are sent to owners, co-ubmitters, or voters when an idea is merged. The process is completely silent to avoid spamming users.

• For the Child Idea (Read-Only Status): The child idea is immediately locked and converted to a fully read-only record. All standard user interactions—including editing, commenting, voting, sharing, and emailing—are disabled on the child idea.
• Automatic User Redirection: If a user directly visits the URL of a merged child idea, the system automatically redirects them to the parent idea. A prominent system alert is displayed at the top of the screen to inform them that they have been redirected because the idea was merged. 
• Consolidated Analytics: The parent idea instantly reflects the combined weight of the community's interest, boasting a higher vote count and a centralized comment section for product teams to review. 
  
  
  

Effects of Unmerging an Idea

Because the system retains a clean ledger of the original data states, unmerging acts as a flawless rollback with the following impacts:

• Perfect Data Restitution: All comments, files, tags, and unique votes that originally belonged to the child idea are automatically removed from the parent and restored to the child.
• Restored Activity: The child idea immediately exits its read-only state. It becomes interactive again, allowing users to vote, comment, and edit normally.
• Clean Metrics: The parent idea's vote counts and comment metrics will decrease appropriately, shedding the data that belonged to the removed child.
• No Expiration Date: There is currently no time limit on when an unmerge can be performed. A moderator can reverse a merge months after it initially occurred.