Two conversations often turn out to be about one thing. Sometimes that's a duplicate; sometimes it's thirty customers hitting the same outage. Gleap keeps those separate, because they need different handling.
Linking connects two tickets that relate to each other while both stay independent. Each shows the other, so anyone opening one sees the context.
Use it when the same customer has two threads that inform each other, or when a conversation and a bug report belong together — the customer keeps their conversation, engineering keeps the bug, and neither loses the connection.
A tracker is a ticket that other tickets sit underneath. One ticket represents the issue itself; every customer report about it becomes a sub-ticket attached to it.
That's the shape you want for an incident. Your team works on one thing rather than thirty, and you can see at a glance how many customers are affected — which is also the number that decides how urgent it is.
Attaching a report doesn't answer the customer. Each of them still wrote to you and still expects a reply — the tracker organises your side of it, not theirs.
In practice: acknowledge each one briefly, work the tracker, and when it's resolved go back and tell them. That last step is the one that gets skipped, and it's the one customers remember.
If two tickets are genuinely the same conversation — the same person wrote twice, or an email and a chat about one problem — merging is right rather than linking. That combines them into one thread instead of maintaining two.
The rule of thumb: same person and same problem, merge. Different people and same cause, tracker. Related but separate, link.
