Looking at post someone quotes or replies to?

There may well be a discourse trick I don’t know about.

But in a busy thread, when Abelard responds to Heloïse or quotes her, is there an easy way to look at the old Heloïse post without searching back umpteen messages?

There’s an arrow pointing up in the right upper corner of the post that’s a quote of another post. Clicking that arrow takes you to the original post.

To test this, I quoted your OP and there will be that arrow in this post.

And if Alice replies to Bob without quoting there’s a different curved arrow displayed. Which when clicked takes you to the post replied to.

This post is a reply to @EinsteinsHund’s post two posts up from this one. Click the curved arrow next to their icon to be taken to their post.

But if Alice replies to the entire thread (“Reply” button at the bottom of the UI, not the “Reply” button on Bob’s post) there will be no such context linkage, because only Alice knows they they intended to reply to Bob, but used the wrong button, so Discourse didn’t know that.

Thanks. Never knew what those arrows were for and the manual way was tedious.

Rule of thumb on the www in general and Discourse in particular: everything is a button which does something; click it and find out what. The only user manual is your own curiosity to click on any/everything.