The original content that a comment has responded to isn't viewable when the response has been transferred to another thread

Contribute Bug

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around an issue where the original content of a comment is not viewable when the response has been transferred to another thread. rokejulianlockhart provides an example of this issue and sam explains that a simple solution would be to clear the ‘reply’ info on the posts, but this would leave confusing disjointed replies. sam further explains that a sophisticated fix would be complex and involve significant changes to the Discourse internals, such as converting ‘off topic’ replies to a different structure or amending the post table. rokejulianlockhart suggests an alternative solution where the comment is rendered as before when clicked, with an indicator of its externality, but sam notes that this is not currently supported by Discourse.

1

Example

Reproduction

You can see an example at:

It responds to:

2 Likes
2

This is a tricky situation with no clear winner.

The simplest solution would be for us to clear the “reply” info on the posts below when you move a parent, but that leaves a bunch of confusing disjointed replies.

This thought leaves a bunch of confusing replies on the original topic.

A sophisticated fix may be

  1. Removing the reply information from children
  2. Inserting a “quote” into children so they are glued correctly to the new home.
4

@Sam, I was expecting the comment, despite being in a separate thread, to be rendered as before, when I clicked the response indicator:

The image shows a user asking about native passkey support on MacOS in an online community, with various interaction icons below the post. (Captioned by AI)
The image shows a user asking about native passkey support on MacOS in an online community, with various interaction icons below the post. (Captioned by AI)756×366 22.9 KB

It would appear as the user expects, without us needing to modify another comment’s content, nor remove response information. Solely when clicked would a user notice that it’s elsewhere, unless an indicator of its externality were placed around it.

5

I follow this, but sadly the internals of Discourse do not support this, it is a very complex change.

Technically a post stores “reply to post_number” it does not store “reply to post_id”, so a fix here would have to involve converting the “off topic” replies to some other structure or amending the post table.

1 Like