If I am not mistaken, the current way for merging stories is to wait for a mod to perform the operation. In case a user spots it, probably has to (somehow) summon a mod. This can result in no action being taken if the mods don’t spot it, or the users downvoting a relevant side of the story as “already posted” when the new link can actually be interesting anyway.
For that reason, the obvious suggestion I imagine is to add a new button to the suggest dialog that notifies the mods about the request. I know this is not as trivial to implement as a new tag, but it can be interesting under certain circumstances (like for example the GitHub and Microsoft soap opera).
Your understanding of the way the feature works and doesn’t is correct. I don’t think it needs to notify the mods, just follow the existing logic for when there’s enough user suggestions and no prior mod actions. See
StoriesController#submit_suggestionsfor an entry point and, in theStorymodel, the methods startingsave_suggested_.Are merges easy to undo once performed? If not, I suspect that a (relatively) small group of users could cause serious vandalism by suggesting many unrelated comment sections be merged.
Yeah, trivial to undo.
Users are currently entrusted with tag and title editing now and so far have not abused it, I don’t worry that they’d begin with merging. I’d rather not create a second class of users, that drags in a whole lot of social hierarchy baggage that humans have.