I found a way to “reproduce” a whole thread which was laborious but no way to truly duplicate it. (Retaining the likes for instance)
I create a new thread and put it in a non accessible category e.g. staff. I copy each reply from the original topic tread and paste it in a reply in the new topic thread. For replies I only need in the new topic thread, I just select and move them. Then I change ownership of the copied reply to the name of the poster of the original reply. Once I am done, I close the original thread and I change the category of the new topic to a public category.
Of course this is too painstaking to use on a regular basis. The reason I needed to do it this time was because someone created a topic with a very long title that could be interpreted in two different topic threads. We (moderators) noted the issue of long title (this will be restricted to less characters now) but didn’t realize at that time that it would cause a problem.
The conversation started and before we knew it, we had two very intertwined delicate conversations going on, with some offensive comments from one member that nevertheless provoked a rich series of responses in both matters.
To retain the richness of the contributions that had taken place, to reprimand the repeated offender, to use the event for community educational purpose and to permit both valuable conversations to grow each their way, I determined that it was best to split the topics apart, keeping only the pertinent interventions to each but not hesitating to repeat in both the interventions that were covering both matters for clarity comprehension purposes.
In the topic thread that retained the offensive reply, I also put a staff notice before the offensive post saying that it wasn’t in accordance with our community values but that we’d let it for educational purpose. I doctored that post in the following manner: I put the markdown code < del >
In front of the offensive language
I explained that to express his opinion in a constructive manner the member
would have been better wording it
< ins > this way instead.
That was a lot of work and thinking. I would not do that again manually. But the use case is definitely there.