Sometimes users accidentally reply to the wrong post. When that happens I often see them awkwardly apologize to the person they accidentally replied to, or delete their post just to recreate it replying to the correct person. I think it would be really helpful if, when editing a post, there was an easy way to change the “in reply to” post.
Here’s one possible approach:
When you’re in the middle of editing a post, you can click a reply icon to another post. Right now this either empties the contents of the editor (if you’ve made no changes so far), or prompts you to see if you want to abandon your edit (if you’ve already made changes). Perhaps somewhere in that workflow it could ask you if you want to redirect your post to be in reply to the post you just hit the reply button for.
Another option might be to have something in the editor itself, similar to the advanced reply options when creating a new post. But I’m not really sure how you’d select the new post you want the reply to be for in that case.
Anyway, I think this would be really useful (especially for newer members) if a good workflow can be figured out.
Unlikely to happen; a lot of tricky engineering work for a rare and edge case.
Plus, I think users should be penalized for not getting replies right, and do it over the right way so they can learn how to reply intentionally and be consistent in the future. So even if we could do this, philosophically I don’t agree with it, as it is enabling bad behavior.
I just ran into this. User obviously aimed a reply at a specific post, but replied to the topic. The reply requires the context of the earlier post to make sense. It would be nice to be able to administratively “re-parent” the reply somehow.
I understand Jeff’s philosophical position on this (“it is enabling bad behavior.”) But I think there are occasions where, for the benefit of a topic, an admin might want to quickly patch something up and communicate with the user after the fact.
I don’t understand. It happens every day even here, by team members too, but it doesn’t bother anyone. Too much anyway, because everyone knows nothing can be done.
It isn’t that obvious whether a reply should go to the topic or the post. So it is a much bigger question than just about educating and penalizing.
And how should we penalize an user for using the wrong reply button? Public shaming or silencing? We don’t penalize in any way when an user uses the wrong category or tag. We just fix it and that’s it, just another Tuesday. But this we can’t fix when it would be suitable.