It’s a known ‘feature’ that when a post has one reply immediately following
it, the reply doesn’t show the ‘replying to’ symbol (in the top right corner).
This has often led to confusion about whether the reply actually is a reply to the
previous post, or is a reply to the original post.
This thread from the Discourse Meta site appears to show how this can be
cured :-
Maybe this should be in Site Feedback… No doubt i’ll find out soon !
Moved to Site Feedback (from ATMB).
And I will see if we can get this turned on.
Be a good idea. Requires the bare minimum of notice, just a symbol as an indicator is sufficient.
This is a great idea. The ambiguity of whether a post is replying to the OP or to the immediately preceding post is a real nuisance. And worse, if you quote the immediately preceding post in full, Discourse “helpfully” removes the quote!
Unless you edit the quote if only to remove a punctuation mark, because someone once upon a time decided that Discourse shouldn’t have verbatim repeats of posts.
Agreed.
Agree it’s an irritant. And that if there is a config setting to address this shortcoming we should flip that switch.
E.g.: This post is entered as a reply to Thudlow_Boink’s post just above. But doesn’t look like it.
I deliberately used the traditional bolding rather than the @ syntax on their name in this post to avoid creating the @ notification to them and thereby muddying the waters of whether they’re notified for by being replied to versus notified for being @-ed.
My own workaround is not to quote the entirety of the preceding post then diddle a space or period into the quote. IMO that’s dumb and overkill.
If a partial quote of the preceding post is relevant, use that where it fits in your own post and you get the right result for the wrong reason. If a partial quote isn’t appropriate to what I’m writing I’ll start my post with something like:
@LSLGuy just above …
Blah blah blah
My workaround is to quote it in its entirety.
Well, what do you know … it appears that this can be cured too !
by disabling the remove full quote site setting.
FYI @engineer_comp_geek
Nice find! Meanwhile I’ve been working around the full quote removal by adding the hidden string to the end of the quote.
IMO the audience playing at home does not need to see an entire post repeated to understand somebody is talking to/about the post / poster just above them. That way is pure clutter and confusion.
Do not disable the “no full quote of preceding post” feature. In fact, go the other way and make workarounds like @wolfpup just described a rule violation. Quoting a relevant excerpt is fine. But any gaming the system to quote substantially the entirety of the preceding post is something we should be vigorously squashing, not encouraging.
Instead TPTB should tweak the reply-to-post button so a reply to the immediately preceding post is clearly labeled as a reply to the immediately preceding post. Just like it is when it’s a reply to another post farther up. Since this also appears to be an existing settable option in Discourse, doing this right is ought to be easy.
Wow, that’s a militant side of you I haven’t seen before! 
I must admit that one of the reasons I do the full quote workaround is because of the ambiguity about who you’re actually responding to – the previous poster, or the OP. If there was a clear indication who the response was directed to I might feel less inclined to do that.
But still, if you have an OP that says “I’m a very strong believer in x” and you’re replying to a preceding post that says “x is bullshit” and your post is “I disagree”, it’s kinda handy to make it super clear who you’re responding to!
I agree with @LSLGuy that people should not quote the entire previous post, or even most of it.
@Wolfpup two above …
You (every you) should absolutely positively always make it clear who you’re responding to: the OP person/post specifically, the entire thread to date, or the poster/post immediately preceding your own. As I just did by @-ing you.
But in the latter case quoting their entire 17 paragraph post is a really disruptive way to do that. Quoting even a short post entire is also disruptive. That disruption is what I’m objecting to. And I wasn’t trying to single you out; I’ve made the same point several times already in this thread and the dozen-ish other threads we’ve had on this topic in the last 5 years.
Quoting the whole thing with a diddle to fool a useful Discourse feature is vandalism, not outsmarting.
The people who are taking the trouble to prevent Discourse from deleting the quote are not the people who are quoting an entire 17-paragraph post. Quoting an entire 17-paragraph post is almost never appropriate, and it’s reasonable for the software to remove that. But it can sometimes be appropriate to quote a one-line post in its entirety.
In response to both @LSLGuy and @Chronos, I have occasionally seen posts that quote an enormous prior post in full, and I agree that this is disruptive and bad practice. I mean, what is the poster thinking – that you’re supposed to re-read the 17 paragraphs you’ve just read before reading the poster’s illustrious response? But Discourse doesn’t prevent that (nor do I think it should; some things shouldn’t be automated and should be a matter of sensible posting etiquette). What it does prevent is what is often useful in disambiguating who you’re responding to, and having such a “feature” as the default is just bad design.
I’d never quote the previous post in full if it was more than a few lines. But if it’s short, and helps clarify who you’re responding to, I don’t see it as being in any way disruptive or, as the Discourse designers like to say, “clutter”. These were the folks who were so obsessed with eliminating “clutter” that for a time we had date formats on posts that were very easily misinterpreted (April '08 vs April 08) because it was considered “elegant” to have only the minimal necessary information to unambiguously resolve the date. The problem being that the users of these boards are human beings and not computers.
This is about a reply to the previous post. It requires very little for that to be automatic with as little as symbol, or some minimal text. At least identify the post in case of cross posting.
I hate this so much.
Any news on this ?