When I hit reply to someone what they said does not pop up in my post. Am I missing something?
Highlight what you want to quote and a box should pop up with “quote,” “copy quote,” and “share.”
Animated GIF example, from the Discourse mothership:
Highlight the portion you want to quote, then “quote” pops up as a choice. Hit it.
The board software won’t allow you to quote the entire post without jumping through hoops - if you choose the entire post, it’ll disappear when you post.
Nice!
Hit “reply” and then the plus sign to the right of the smiley and select “quote whole post,” like I did here. It seems to work fine for me.
It’ll let you quote the entire post as long as it isn’t the immediately previous post.
Like yours? Or do you mean something else by “immediately previous.”
ETA:
AH HA! I see now. It was there and disappeared. Weird glitch. It showed up in the preview. Showed up for a split second in the actual posted reply and then … poof … gone! With as old as Discourse is by now, I wonder why it hasn’t been patched. Seems like a rather obvious thing to patch immediately.
I was going to also suggest this, but it seemed more complicated. And on my cell phone, that plus sign and the smiley aren’t visible - you have to scroll the row over to the right.
They like it Iike that. We have threads about it. Discourse thinks it should be obvious who/what you’re replying to by context, so why allow the entire quote? Except they remove the arrow that shows that you’re replying to someone in the first place.
Officially, not a glitch. A feature. The designers were quite clear that quoting a full post immediately after the post is considered a waste of space and bad for the visual flow and appearance of the thread, so the system purges the quote.
Unless you invisibly alter the quote (in a way that won’t violate our rules here), like adding a space after the last character.
The programmers of Discourse spent a lot of time and effort in creating features that most users would really rather they hadn’t.
When I want to quote the entire previous post (usually in a Botticelli game), I
– do the quote
– Ctrl-C the quote to copy it
– post my message
– edit the post to copy the deleted portion back into it
– save the edit
It is a customizable feature. It could be turned off.
I have complained about it many times, but it appears that
we like it that way. 
Actually, hearing the reasoning, it does make sense to me not to completely repost the immediately previous post for purposes of avoiding needless redundancy, but it would be nice to at least have some indication that the reply is to the previous post (didn’t we use to have an arrow or something?) instead of another standalone post. I mean, you can say “just use context,” but I know I’ve run across posts where I couldn’t tell if the post was a reply to the OP or the preceding post.
That can be fixed too…
Moved to site feedback, as this is about the software that the board runs on.
Heh, this so much.
This is one of those deliberate anti-features Chronos mentions. It’s not an oversight, they are directly against having that sort of clarity: Question/suggestion about arrow/icon referencing replied to post - Feature - Discourse Meta
(EDIT: But this setting can be changed, as @pjd already pointed out)
Exactly!
A weird design choice, to be sure.