Thanks for the pointer — I’ve now read through the whole “Will disable_jump_reply make a return?” topic.
I understand the reasoning behind removing the old disable_jump_reply preference:
it was broken at the time, very few people were using it, and Discourse generally tries to avoid accumulating lots of global user prefs. I also see the design philosophy you described there — using the auto-jump as a way to encourage people to read the full topic before replying, with more “expert” workflows hidden behind things like modifier keys or advanced options.
The Shift + Reply shortcut definitely helps in some cases, and I appreciate you mentioning it. The problem for me is that:
it’s not discoverable at all unless you’ve read that specific Meta topic or someone tells you,
it adds mental overhead to remember a special key every single time, and
when you’re catching up on long topics across multiple Discourse forums, being yanked hundreds of posts away from where you were reading still feels like a pretty heavy “punishment” for a simple reply.
One of the things I personally love about Discourse is exactly its flexibility:
as an admin or as a user you can tweak a lot of details to match your own reading and navigation habits. From that perspective, this feels like an area where a small amount of extra configurability could go a long way, without turning the UI into a wall of options.
For example, any of these would already be a big improvement:
A visible “reply without jumping” option in the UI (even if it’s considered an advanced / expert action),
Or a user-level / site-level toggle hidden behind an “advanced” section, so that people who really care about this behavior can opt out of the jump once, instead of relying on a hidden shortcut forever.
I completely understand the concern about having too many prefs, and I’m not asking to bring back every obscure setting. I just wanted to share the view from someone who spends a lot of time replying while reading through older posts:
for this particular behavior, the cost of not having a clear, discoverable choice feels higher than for many other preferences.
In any case, thank you again for the explanation and the Shift tip — it’s very helpful to know the background, even if I still hope this might be reconsidered as some kind of optional or “expert” setting in the future.