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Merge Ideas

Merge duplicate ideas together so one idea becomes the parent to one or more child ideas.

Required Editions

View supported editions
User Permissions Needed
To merge multiple ideas: Edit on ideas

As more users contribute to a zone, the number of duplicate ideas often increases. Duplicate ideas make it difficult to measure feedback because votes and comments are spread out over many similar ideas.

Note the following about merging ideas.

  • After you merge ideas they can’t be separated.
  • All votes belonging to child ideas are transferred to the parent idea. If the same community member votes for two ideas that are eventually merged, only the vote for the parent idea is kept; the vote for the child idea is discarded.
  • Users can vote for and add comments to only a parent idea.
  • You can’t merge ideas in separate zones.
  • Deleting a parent idea automatically deletes all child ideas. Child ideas can’t be deleted individually.
  • The parent idea doesn’t inherit the status and category values of its child ideas.
  • When an idea is merged and becomes a child idea, the child idea still appears on the Ideas Submitted page. But it doesn’t appear on any other pages in a zone member's Recent Activity.
  • Merged ideas don’t appear in the list of submitted ideas on the Idea Themes detail page and aren’t counted in the Submitted Ideas field.
  • When you merge a child idea, you can no longer edit the Idea Theme field.
  • A child idea that has been merged is still visible to the user who submitted the idea from the Ideas Submitted list on the user’s Recent Activity page.

To locate duplicate ideas and merge them together:

  1. On the Ideas tab, click the title of an idea that you want to merge.
  2. On the idea's detail page, click Find Duplicates. Salesforce searches all the ideas within the zone and displays the five ideas with titles that most closely match the current idea's title.
  3. If the Possible Duplicates list doesn’t contain any ideas that you want to merge, enter keywords in the Search for Duplicates field and click Search. Salesforce displays a new list of possible duplicate ideas.
  4. From the Possible Duplicates list, select the ideas that you want to merge. To view the details of a possible duplicate idea, click the idea's title. Use your browser's back button to return to the search results.
  5. Click Merge with Current Idea.
  6. Select the idea that you want to be the parent idea, and click Merge.
  7. T to complete the merge, click OK.