Merge or reject duplicate requests

[chandler05]

The Problem

Duplicate requests happen often

Possible Solution

If an exact duplicate of another request is requested, we either merge them into a single internal request or reject the duplicate request

[violine1101]

Problem here: How do we determine if we're dealing with duplicate requests? Does the message match exactly? Do we check ticket IDs and if the same tickets are mentioned in both requests?

[chandler05]

I think we could just establish a standard form of requests to make them all look the same and then do an exact match.

[violine1101]

I'd like to avoid that. It's unintuitive for the users and it's annoying to enforce, even with MojiraBot. Just for this feature that doesn't seem worth it.

[chandler05]

Well, I still think exact match would be the better solution, however alternatively we could check the pattern of words being in between, before, or after the tickets as well as the tickets themselves, so "X duplicates Y" would be a dupe of "X duplicate of Y" but not "X and Y are duplicates" because the words are arranged in a different pattern.

[violine1101]

If we only use exact match people will just abuse this system by altering their messages a little bit just to fool the bot at which point we again need to reimplement this. It's just not worth the effort. Just warn users who intentionally post duplicate requests and if they continue kick them from the server.

[chandler05]

This isn't a feature for stopping those users. This is for people who accidentally make duplicate requests, which there are quite a number of, and by doing the exact matching we can filter out the most obvious duplicates

[Jack-McKalling]

How about some kind of way for the bot to groupmention other requests that have the exact same ticket ID in them, so we can determine if it is a duplicate of one of them?

Similar to how comments are added, it could add a list of potential duplicates by just copying the text with link of/to the internal request. Like this:

User#1234
MC-123456 Something needs to be done about this report
Go To
Message in #java-requests

Potential duplicate requests:
MC-123456 This report needs this and that (link)

Someday at 12:34