Okay, I admit it. I have some posters on Ignore. It has come to my attention that the current software disappears not only every post that an ignored poster has submitted, it also recalculates how many posts exist in the thread. You can find a thread in the TOC for a forum, and learn the true post count, but click on that thread, and if any of your ignored posters have posted in it, Discourse has decided to tell you that the only ones that exist are the ones you haven’t instructed it to not display.
I contend that this feature is counterproductive and stupid. If I wish to direct the group’s attention to a post by post number, I should be able to. But if I’ve ignored anyone, the number I reference will not lead to the post I intend to allude to.
F’rinstance, I was following a thread where someone referenced post 328. The scrollbar, meanwhile, was telling me that the thread has 314 posts. And the forum TOC tells me that there are 351. And that doesn’t even get into the question of whether it’s really post 328, because the person who referenced it might themselves have someone on Ignore.
Please fix this.
Link the post instead. That way there’s no faffing around with post numbers.
Click the “post date/time since posted” entry at the top right of the “offending” post and you’ll get a popup with, among other things, the direct URL of that post pre-selected for your copy/paste convenience.
For instance, the direct URL of this post:
This isn’t correct; post numbering is absolute (from the top of the topic down), never relative.
To learn the post number of any particular reply (replies start at post #2 for what I hope are obvious reasons 
) click or tap the timestamp on the post at upper right.
The URL itself will give you a hint about this, e.g.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/topic-title/937393/2
t/topic-title/937393/2
937393/2
The topic ID is 937393 and that is post 2 in the topic.
Also note that any “share” or “link” button on a post will give you a hard, direct perma link to that specific post in the topic. So you can press the link or share button at the bottom of the post, in addition to the timestamp at upper right of the post.
The only way I can think of that a link to a post would stop working, is if staff deleted the post from the topic, or if staff deleted the topic altogether.
(Ah, I remembered another way – if staff move the post to a different topic, but there will be breadcrumb trails of the move in both topics, and bidirectional links on each side.)
Possibly useful information. I didn’t know about the URL availability because I’ve never had a reason to click on the timestamp – I just mouse over it.