To me, these two Reply buttons have different meaning. The Reply on the upper right implies that I will reply to that post, whereas the Reply button at the bottom implies that I will reply to the OP.
If there is consensus, could this behavior be changed?
AI-generated summary
A discussion is underway about the different implied meanings of the “Reply” button in Discourse. JohnAtl suggests that the “Reply” button at the top right of a post implies a direct response to that post, while the button at the bottom implies a response to the original post (OP). Falco asks for clarification on what behavior change is being proposed. hellekin explains that the “Reply to post” and “Reply to topic” buttons serve distinct purposes, allowing users to address specific posts or the conversation as a whole, which helps prevent topic dilution and maintains content quality.
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Changed to what exactly?
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Reply to the post is intended as a direct reply to that post, usually when there are other responses in-between.
Reply to topic is intended to responses to the conversation itself, not necessarily the OP, since a discussion can develop and drift from the original post.
In practice it is useful to distinguish drifts when staff want to split a specific discussion within a topic that would better be addressed in its own topic, i.e., to keep the original intent of the OP. An example would be a topic on a specific issue deriving to an accessory concern: staff can select “post + replies” as a shortcut, and move this discussion elsewhere.
This avoids the dilution phenomenon that is often found in classical forums where a single topic covers other topics as well, leading to search engine pollution – where unrelated topics pop up in your search results that are not actionable. Discourse makes it easy to keep discussion on track and provide a much higher quality of contents.
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