In a discussion titled “Ambiguous replies” under the Support category, abrambailey noticed that the “In Reply To” metadata doesn’t appear when replying to the most recent post in a thread, asking how to differentiate such replies and how email notifications behave. codinghorror explained that this metadata is suppressed by default to reduce visual clutter when there’s only one reply directly under the post it replies to — though this can be adjusted via site settings by searching for “suppress”. abrambailey followed up asking whether notifications still reach users who are directly replied to despite the visual suppression. Remah clarified that email preferences are user-specific and depend on individual settings and online status, linking to an example preferences page. codinghorror confirmed that notifications function normally regardless of visual suppression — the setting only affects on-screen metadata. abrambailey acknowledged understanding and requested the thread be locked.
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.
