theriex
commented
4 years ago In the absence of a real need for grouping, it has been removed. While it is now possible to create a duplicate membic for the same thing, that wasn't really prevented before given the aforementioned url variations. Predictable and easily understood behavior is better.
When two theme members each post membics for the same link, the current default display behavior is to group the membics together under the most recent one. The reason is to try and maximize link variety for a theme being displayed as an embedded web page. That can be good, but for some themes it's better to see all the posts separately in order to provide a better sense of who posted what and when.
The default behavior is further complicated by functionally equivalent links not being recognized as the same. For example two membics with different URLs for the same book might appear the same, but the system probably won't be able to figure that out in all cases, leading to an apparent equivalent membic link being displayed separately rather than grouped.
For a theme where the founder knows all the contributing members, they can get around the apparent dupe by asking the second person posting to please use the URL from the first post. That may not be convenient, but if maintaining link variety is a goal, it's a way to do it. However if grouping duplicates is not desirable, there should be a way to turn off the default grouping behavior entirely.
The recommendation is to provide a setting (saved in the theme cliset field) where a theme founder can turn off the grouping behavior for the theme. Consider leaving membic link grouping off by default.