Similar Requests
How FeatureVote steers submitters toward existing requests to prevent duplicates
When someone submits a new request on your public board, FeatureVote checks whether a similar request already exists — and if so, nudges them to vote for it instead of creating a duplicate. This keeps demand consolidated and your board clean, without you having to merge duplicates after the fact.
This happens on your public board and embed automatically. It's separate from the admin merge duplicates tool, which you use on requests that are already on the board.
What the Submitter Sees
A visitor fills in their request and clicks submit. Before the request is created, FeatureVote briefly checks for similar existing requests (the button shows "Checking for similar requests…").
If it finds close matches, instead of submitting, it shows a panel:
Looks like this might already exist Voting for an existing request is the fastest way to boost it.
The panel lists up to three existing requests, each with its title, its current vote count, and a short explanation of why it looks similar.
What They Can Do
From the panel, the submitter can:
- Vote instead — vote for an existing request right there. (If they haven't given an email yet, they're asked for one first.) The dialog then closes.
- Submit anyway — go ahead and create their new request as written. The submit button relabels to "Submit anyway" once matches are shown.
- Edit their draft — changing the title or description hides the panel; the check runs again on the next submit.
How Matching Works
Detection is AI-based, in two stages:
- A fast semantic pass compares the draft against your board's existing requests to find likely candidates.
- Those candidates are scored for how closely they match.
Only genuinely close matches are shown (roughly "very likely the same request" and up), capped at three and ordered by strength. Loosely related ideas aren't surfaced, so submitters aren't nagged over every vaguely similar request.
The check is advisory only — it never blocks submission. If the check can't run for any reason, the request submits normally with no interruption.
Similar-request detection reduces duplicates at the source. For the ones that still slip through, use Finding and Merging Duplicates.