Duplicates and Searching Educational PMs

[#1]

I know there have been a lot of ideas and discussion recently about duplicates and how to prevent them

my suggestion is less for giffgaff and more for the members with the power to mark duplicates (I dont know the exact list of who these people are? also is there a specific name for them? typing that out every time is slightly annoying )

When an idea is marked as a duplicate, if appropriate, the member who changes its status to duplicate should send a PM to the idea's author explaining about duplicates and encouraging searching. Hopefully new users would take notice and learn from this. This PM could just be a standard template, but I think a PM could be more informative and give more detail than just a one line comment on the idea thread saying 'duplicate' or 'please search in future'

I image that in some cases such a PM would not always be needed (e.g. senior/long standing gg member who should know better, or who did search but not using quite the right key terms so the previous idea did not come up). So its up to the judgement of the user who marks it as a duplicate whether or not to send the PM, but I think they are the people best placed to do this (as they are 'on the spot', as it were)

What do people think? For all I know, some members with the power to mark duplicates might do this already?

Cheers for reading

[#2]

I'm sorry if this is going to sound wrong, but it might not be much longer before the number of threads commenting about duplicate ideas becomes perhaps almost as tedious than the actual problem.

[#3]

@andy0 think thats the aim lol, giffgaff may do something then. Although these idea's may be better suited to the improvements section.

[#4]

I agree with andy0 and trudiw. It wouldn't take long before people started to resent the people marking things as duplicates. They probably get a certain amount of greif from it as it is, but in spite of this, I think it's a good idea, as I think the majority of the duplicate ideas are posted by people who are doing so ignorantly, without having done a search first, and a PM would sort this out.

[#5]

@trudi 3.bp.blogspot.com/_u7wcWVao2AI/TQ1cZhZUFkI/AAAAAAAABBU/xj92_0dy6lM/s1600/gazza_vinnie_380x52_929254a.jpg

[#6]

Yep that's the one !!