[drdaeman]

> even though it's the tenth or fiftieth or five hundredth time the same thing has come up

Immediate thought: merging topics is drastically different from closing or deleting them.

Slightly off-topic below:

Generally speaking, I would love a technological solution for QA redundancy. Saw way too many long forum threads that have asked same/similar questions over and over. Not politics and not from bad actors, but e.g. reviews of new devices etc, where everyone and their dogs asks about, say, battery life, every 10 pages. StackOverflow-like QA platforms provide some structure to this, but are limited to objective answers. For example, there's no SO for book plot reviews/discussions and SO format isn't really appropriate there.