Sometimes when I post in a thread I accidentally reply to a particular poster, rather than to the thread itself. The person gets a note of a reply, even though my post doesn’t address them directly.
I’ve tried editing, but I can’t find a way to remove the reference. Is there a way?
Not an enormous problem, but it is somewhat annoying.
At the top left of the reply box is an arrow. Click it, then click “Reply To Topic”.
Alternatively, copy the post, close/discard the reply, then reply to the thread and paste what you were about to post.
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here’s the arrow
FWIW, you can also do this in reverse. You can, even after you’ve started typing a reply, click the reply button in someone’s post and it’ll now be a reply to them instead of to the topic itself. If it’s already a reply to a person, you can do this to change which post/poster it’s directed at.
This is a test of replying directly to Joey_P’s post #2, saving my post, then later editing it to reply to the thread overall.
Here’s the reply to him.
And now on edit his cited [change where the post is going] feature doesn’t exist.
My conclusion FWIW:
Once you begin a post you can always change who it replies to by simply copying your entire text onto the clipboard, discarding your not-yet-posted post, then opening a new one replying to the correct target. Be that the whole thread or the same or a different post or poster in it.
Likewise you can switch back from [reply to poster] to [reply to thread] or via Joey_P’s technique. There’s even a feature where if you start out with [reply to thread] you can change that to [reply to last post] which isn’t quite the same thing.
Once posted though, your post is permanently attached to whatever it replied to. That target can’t be changed in a subsequent edit. Which I believe was the OP’s goal: editing the target after posting
That I don’t think I was aware of, but when I make that mistake, I think I usually either explain the mistake or leave it alone and assume the other person will figure out that it wasn’t meant as a reply to them. Sometimes it seems like discourse went out of it’s way to make replies more confusing than they need to be.
testing
That is correct.
If I realize I responded to the wrong person, and already hit reply, and can’t discard the post, at a minimum I’ll add an @Dopername to the message, or quote something from the right post.
This.
Often I’ll be replying to the last post of the thread by clicking the thread reply, then blabbering away verbosely for minutes while 2 or 3 other posts sneak in. Then I submit my post which now makes no sense in the context below those intervenors.
Time to edit in a
ETA: @SoandSo two posts up.
at the top.
I think it’s trying to “help” in a lot of cases, but ends up doing the opposite.