A lot of threads are being closed around here for the slightest similarity to another. Some I agree with, some I don't. If a thread only has a few posts in then by all means go ahead and close it. But some threads are decent sized and have their own topic of conversations flowing which wouldn't be picked up again if the thread was locked with a link to the other thread.

I don't know for sure, but I have a feeling that "merging" the threads would be difficult for the mods. I mean, they've been saying for months they'll give us a search function and a reader review function, but those still aren't here yet!
_{Just kidding. I bow down to thee Nintendo Life moderators. Don't ban me.}

Yeah, the way the forums are designed, we don't have the ability to merge threads, or to move them, or to change the URL. (We had a case recently where a user created a thread with a profanity in the title. We could easily edit out the profanity, but the URL wouldn't change, and so the entire thread had to go.)

I can't speak for the others, but I'd prefer to salvage whatever conversation there is than just lock the thread outright...unfortunately, we don't have that option currently.

echoing what CB said -- Ant said a long time ago that there was no way to merge threads (well, he could probably do it, but not us with the tools we have available to us right now). if there was a way to merge threads instead of locking them, i'd be doing that instead.

either way, we're damned if we do lock similar threads, and damned if we don't -- people will complain either way, so i'm going to keep doing what i'm doing until there's an alternative available. :3