I’d like a quick way to find the parent of a post. When you click the little icon to expand what’s being replied to, you sometimes get a dozen posts and get scrolled all the way up to the top of them (which is rarely what I want). I’d really like a reliable way to find and view the single, direct parent post (and then from there, a way to find its parent, and so on, one by one, as desired). I like and frequently use the “parent” links on Reddit and Hacker News, which accomplish this.
When you expand the ancestors, just scrolling you up to the start of the parent post, instead of the start of the oldest ancestor, would help. But it wouldn’t be a perfect solution because when you read the parent, and then want its parent, you’d have to scroll up through two posts to find the right place, and if they’re long and contain section headers you might miss the spot if going quickly. It’d be better if the software could take you to the right spot itself.
My most common use case for this is when people reply without using any quotations. If it’s a busy topic with multiple new posts since their last post, then I usually need to see one parent post to figure out what they’re talking about, but I usually don’t need to see any older ancestor posts.
EDIT: If you’re having issues with this, look at the “max reply history” setting. The default of 1 will solve the majority of this problem (my forum had it at 5 and I forgot the setting existed).
When Discourse was created this sort of post structure was intentionally left out in favor of mostly-flat discussions.
So at the moment, posts are only aware of their immediate relationships: “in reply to” and “X replies to this post.”
Data like “this is a reply to post X which is a reply to post Y and post Z is the parent” is not produced… so there’s no concept of a “reply chain” available.
I’m happy to mostly read linearly and don’t want to switch to fully threaded discussions like on reddit. But when people write a reply with no quotation then it’s often to one of the most recent 10 posts, and I need a quick way to see the text it’s a reply to. I do occasionally need to trace back replies a few levels.
Someone mentioned a “max reply history” setting but then I think they quickly deleted their post. That was really helpful. My forum had that set to 5, but the default of 1 will work better for me. This makes the important “in reply to” relationship that you mentioned much easier to access.
With this setting change, finding the immediate parent works much better and I’m happier.
Going back multiple parents now works better than before but is less convenient than on Reddit. You expand the parent, then read it, then scroll back up to the top of it (usually easy; a hassle for very long posts), then click jump to parent. Then you can expand its parent and repeat.
As a minor FYI, I sometimes use the print page view or URL edit to get the markdown for a page in order to view long topics all loaded on one page at once so I can cmd-F them and skim them more easily. In these views, figuring out what the parent is for a post can be a problem, but I still mostly prefer these linear views over trying to look through large topics on Reddit with its nested display.
ah I see, so did changing max reply history mostly solve the problem? It’s not entirely clear to me — if there’s still an issue, a screenshot or linking an example post may help
After the setting change, it’s now easy and convenient to see the direct parent post. So that solves most of my problem.
Reviewing multiple ancestors is now better in some ways but worse in some ways, so there’s a compromise there. Expanding the parent then clicking jump to parent is a little more work than using reddit’s “parent” link, especially if you read a long post then have to scroll back up through it. And the old way where I could scroll through multiple ancestors in a row without any clicks had some advantages. But this is pretty good overall now and I don’t have a specific suggestion that looks obviously better to me.
I would like an optional setting, default to off, to display a parent post link next to the permalink button. But it’s not a huge deal.