I’m not sure if this is a new issue or something that has only recently come to my attention, but it seems that the little “In Reply To” area is not shown when someone replies to the most recent post on a thread. Basically, the thing in the red circle below only appears when you reply to an earlier post in the thread.
Thanks Jeff. Are emails / notifications still sent to people who want to know if they’ve been directly replied to, even when the visual noise is being suppressed.
Email preferences are set per user so it will depend what their preferences are and whether they are on the site at the time. By default, most users will be, e.g. https://meta.discourse.org/u/Remah/preferences/emails shows:
Notifications are handled in the usual way regardless. The referenced site setting is purely about reducing visual metadata noise in the average topic.