It also looks like something has changed on discourse. Up to yesterday, if you replied to a post but not quoting anything you got a “in reply to” link like this:
It seems to be gone or the way how to get it has changed. @Sam?
Now there’s no indication where you replied to making it hard to follow.
thx, Tobias
Hi Tobias- You need to reply from the link on bottom/right of the post itself and not at the bottom of the page. I think that works, I just did it here- let’s see…
-Pascal
It looks to me like that did not work.
How about if i respond to a post that is not the last one in the topic…?
That’s better.
Oh, I see. But IMO that’s not really logical. Like that you can’t tell if someone has answered to a post or the topic.
I’d vote for a consistent behavior: if you hit Reply from the link on bottom/right of the post you should always get an “in reply to” link
thx, Tobias
That makes sense to me as well. Your suggestion, that is…
-Pascal
Nothing has changed since yesterday. I haven’t upgraded the servers yet.
That is very much possible. Maybe I haven’t replied to the last post of a topic without quoting the last days…
But Steve and @sam whats your opinion about this?
thx, Tobias
Its not really a bug, this has always been the case and it always confused me.
Direct replies to a post (like this one) suppress the “in reply to” box. @discourse feels strongly that the added noise of a lot of “pointless” in reply to boxes is just not worth it, so the default is going to stay.
We are open to adding a site setting to remove the suppression.
So what you’re saying is that if there is no “In reply to” box, the reply I am reading is always in reply to the post directly preceding it?
I guess the inconsistent behavior is worse in my book, in this case at least. The posts in this topic kind of demonstrates the weirdness of auto-changing behavior which is otherwise perfectly understandable…
-Pascal
Sort of, lack of box could mean that its a direct reply to previous post OR a general reply to the topic. I can add a setting for it today (default off) and you can see if you prefer the “flood” of “in reply to” as opposed to the ambiguity
Yeah, good, thanks, let’s try it.
There already is a setting for this, it is at /admin under:
supress_reply_directly_below
Don’t show reply count on a post when there is a single reply directly below
Warning, the forum gets very noisy with this on, we have tried it both ways and vastly prefer the suppression – but try it yourselves and see what you think.
I’ve cleared the checkbox Jeff mentioned. I don’t see an immediate difference, but perhaps it will change after I post this reply.
So if that setting does what you’re suggesting @discourse, this post should show an “In reply to” box at the top; it doesn’t. We’re trying to differentiate between replies to the first topic post, and replies to subsequent messages in the thread - at this point they both seem to render identically.
I think we need an extra setting
suppress_reply_directly_above … for the mirror of the functionality.
If you’re worried about that, I suggest quoting the relevant bits of the post when you reply – either by clicking the first button on the toolbar to pull in the entire post, or by highlighting a section of a post with your device and selecting “quote reply”.
As described here:
(this link to try is stable because it is one of the default topics).
If you had both of these behaviors unsuppressed for 1-reply-directly-under, you’d get double “notifications” of a reply, right on top of each other – a “1 reply” on the bottom, and then an “in reply to {user}” directly under that. It’s your choice but that is going to be extremely noisy.
The reasoning is that locality is a strong reference, meaning something directly under a post is very likely to be a response to the post above it. And remember the suppression only takes effect if
there is only 1 and exactly one reply
that reply is directly under the post it is replying to
As a user, I’d be kind of annoyed that I clicked an “in reply to {username}” and it expanded to show me… what was already on my screen directly above the post I am looking at 