I’m sad this discussion have ended without a resolution (from my point of view).
I stumbled upon this while discussing about discourse elsewhere and now, thinking about it again, there are at least two aspects that we haven’t brought, even if they’re obvious…
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good: multiple posts make it easier to edit each one separately (when they’re meant to be separated) and keep track of edit history and time of edition.
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bad: in an active discussion they can break the intended continuity by having other people post in the middle of it and so it can cause a topic to be even more fragmented into interlaced sub-topics. (maybe that’s why you don’t want that behavior?)
For the second one, I think if the sub-topic threading works good enough, there’s no need to worry.
All in all, maybe all I would do would be removing the avatar and name when there are multiple consecutive posts, and trying to separate a single post into such multiple ones when they’re multiple replies, to keep a better sub-topic thread consistency. Maybe even offer a switch button to “merge” and “separate”.
I’m definitely not interested in making any kind of fork, or even programming this but again, if any you @admins could “assign” such a task to me I’d make my time (a long time) to try and implement it. That’s how much I think this should be done! 