How do you dedupe support tickets that don't share any words? Here's our messy attempt.

We build an internal helpdesk, and I want to talk through a problem we only partly solved — because I suspect a lot of you have hit it too, and I'd genuinely like to hear how you handled it.

The most requested thing from our users was never "better ticket forms." It was "please make the duplicates stop."

Here's the shape of it. A deploy goes slightly wrong at a 40-person company. Within ten minutes you have:

a handful of chat messages: "login is broken", "can't get into dashboard???", "deploy looks weird"

several error-tracker events (whatever you run — Sentry, Rollbar, an APM): TokenExpiredError ×2, a 401 spike on /api/auth, a 5xx spike on auth-svc