I disagree, and I think @anotheruser would as well. If you quote someone, you are directly referencing them – that’s a reply. The cases where you would realistically claim
Oh, I quoted something Joe said but I wasn’t talking to Joe
are exceedingly rare… unless you are “talking to” some world famous author like JRR Tolkien, if you are locally quoting someone you are referencing them and replying to them and engaging them in the context of other local ongoing conversations. That’s the entire purpose of discussion software.
(also if you really didn’t want to reply to them, use the plain > quote, not a structured expandable quote.)
If a discussion veers off wildly, to the point that others participating in the topic would object to the very presence of their posts in that topic as defined by the topic title and the first post – it means that conversation should be in a different topic. So either
- Reply as New Topic should have occurred
or
- a moderator Split of their conversation into a new Split Topic should now occur