So I think I have figured out the issue. I think in a recent discourse update there was a change to the “reply to” mechanisms. If you hover over the user icon that @gurtz is referring to, it now reads “Load Parent Post”. Based on the expected behavior which works in meta.discourse.org what it is supposed to do is to create a new expansion above the current post that shows the path of the conversation to get to the current post. See below:
Expected behavior:
However, when you search the “Load Parent Post” in the discourse settings nothing shows up which makes this really hard to troubleshoot. But what I found is what manages this is a thing called “max reply history” and by default this is set to 0. After bumping this up to say 10, this feature is now working as expected.
Let me know if you all have any questions.