a considerable number of empty release groups result from, among other events, releases that were previously merged which happened to originally be from separate release groups. currently, they form a not insignificant portion of the daily edits submitted, and add to the voting queue. i would like to simply propose that we assign the responsibility to modbot of sniffing out any release groups that ARE LEFT VACANT AS A RESULT OF any release merge edit that has been accepted, and perhaps remove it by the next hourly sweep, or at least auto-create a "remove release group" edit with an appropriate explanation note to editors, so the task now is reduced to just the voting bit. if there are any pitfalls to this idea - well, there might be, as otherwise i'd expect this idea to have been thought about long ago. but my searches threw up nothing.