I posted in one of the other threads with a minor comment using the reply feature to a user. The chat log clearly showed a “replying to user” style indication, however the actual post didn’t have any. Is this forum intended to have a post hierarchy like reddit or facebook, or is it entirely linear? And if linear, is the “This user is replying to X” missing from the top of a users post?
Discourse has 2 methods of replying:
- reply to the main thread (using the blue icon button below)
- or reply to a specific post (the reply button at the bottom of someone’s post). If you do this, your post will be indicated as such (see the “replying to…” icon on top right of my post in the screenshot below)
Test post
test post replying directly 2
test attempt 3
All three of those should have been direct replies. shrugs
Sorry for another post. Suppressing the reply indication if it is response to a post directly above is apparently default behavior. This appears to be a ‘feature’ unless changed. I think this could lead to confusion in threads asking for opinions
OP: Should mind resist cost cost 10000 mind?
reply 1: I think it’s balanced at 5 mind.
reply 2: I agree.
OP: Should mind resist cost cost 10000 mind?
reply 1: I think it’s balanced at 5 mind.
reply 2 (replying to 1): I agree.
This is me replying to your particular post
This is me replying to the topic in general
It does work, after the initial two replies. The issue comes in during the second reply. Heres a quote from Jeff Atwood, aka codinghorror, co-founder of discourse, from the link I posted.
If there is
- a single reply
and
- it is directly underneath the post it is replying to
… then metadata is suppressed in the interests of keeping the overall noise down, as it is generally clear from the existing verbal context that this is a reply.
This behavior, between the first reply and second reply could lead to contextual confusion as I’ve indicated above.
Both of these responses were in direct reply to your post, but only one shows the indicator.
If you’d like, this ambiguity/UI issue can be fixed by:
Site owners can change this behavior in their site settings. Search for the word “suppress”.
I’m not following the benefit of having or not-having this “feature”, or maybe I’m just too tired to think. I disabled the suppression - I’m not seeing any changes.
Thank you! I think this will clear up confusion about who is responding to who when new conversation topics pop up. The reply indication is now appearing on my end for the second comment. Why the dev’s implemented unique behavior for the second reply to a thread… maybe we’ll never know.
As this is a more traditional forum and not Reddit, the typical way to show that you’re responding to someone is by quoting them.
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For chains of replies, you can even nest quotes. And when the thing you’re quoting is long, you can also shorten the quote or even replace it with a summary.
Discourse is a bit odd in that there is no obvious way to do this: you have to highlight the text you want to quote, then a box with a quote option will appear.
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