@mprep: What's the point of doing this, though? I can't think of any non-contrived upside to merging old posts, but I can think of a few genuine downsides: Destroying timelines, breaking links to specific message IDs, sometimes hiding/losing "Merited by" markers, sometimes hiding/losing "Last edit" markers, adding new divergences between the forum and its various third-party archives, generating notification noise, and just generally irritating the affected posters (and it's not like Bitcointalk has a flourishing user base, so, why annoy good members for no real upside?). I mean, how much sense does it make to bypass the reporting mechanism and produce these old-post amalgamations on your own? Especially when, as you've said, they likely would have been marked "bad" if they had been reported organically rather than found by your bot.
I fully agree with this.
In my own example of recently merged posts, they are all located in my own
self-moderated topic, so I made sure it was clean-ish enough.
I don't care about few deleted/merged posts, but I don't like receiving a bunch of messages about for no good reason.