In this thread, I copied and replied to part of a post from nightshadea. The poster after me (blabbermeister) copied and replied to a different part of the same post from nightshadea. I received an email notification of blabbermeister’s post, even though I am not in any sense subscribed to the thread (my status is “normal”).
Is copying part of the same post as I did enough to trigger an email notification to me?
It’d be easier to help if you included a link to the thread and told us ALL the notification settings in your profile.
Blabbermeister clearly used the reply button on your post then the quote function for nightshadea. Using the reply function doesn’t leave a trace in the thread if it’s the very next post, but does still notify the replyee
It’s probably what @CardboardBoxx indicated. In general Discourse tries to only notify you when someone is speaking directly to you. That means:
@name mentionThanks! 
It’s also worth mentioning that Discourse tries really hard not to email you when you have a web browser open and are connected to the website. That is, we don’t want to double notify you:
Email is reserved for times when you have not touched the website in 10+ minutes. So we skip step 2 unless we’re confident that none of your web browsers, on any of your computing devices, have pinged the website recently.
(This is configurable via your user preferences if you reeeeaaalllly want a lot more emails.)
Which is exactly one of the cases for why I don’t think Discourse should remove all traces. It should still at least show that little indicator in the corner for who they replied to, and have it link back to the post they replied to, even if that link just scrolls the thread.
I get the desire to remove quoted material, but not removing any indication of who was replied to. It encourages using the reply feature in an unintended manner like this, as the user sees no difference in the post that clicked the global reply button and one which replied to a specific post.
There’s also the obvious exploit of replying to someone using the global reply button, so they don’t get a notification, while everyone in the thread believes they did.
It seems a relatively easy fix to just use the existing UI to show that the post was a reply to the previous post, not to the full thread. There are just so many ways not distinguishing the two can and has caused confusion.
I really wish @codinghorror would look into fixing this.
Seconded.
Although I think most people using global reply just aren’t aware of the difference.
I don’t think it’s his job to implement custom fixes for this website.
So far as we know the problem is not specific to this website.