Hi All,
I know that we can create a new topic via url with special param.
But I want my users to click a link to reply a specific topic. Is there a way to add special params in the url query to auto open reply window for my users? If not, is there a way I can do this?
Yes, @techapj added this a while ago, details are here:
Hi Jeff,
Thank you for your reply, but what I want is that I want my users to reply
a topic which has already been created by others.
eg. I have a topic A in my forum, and I want every user click this link to
reply under topic A, not to create another topic.
What I want is when I open this link, the reply window popup, I want this
action equals to click the “reply” button under a topic.
It has been a while and I haven’t found a way to do it.
I just want to be able to create a link that when clicked opens a specific topic with the reply box activated and with the focus on it.
Something like:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-open-reply-window-via-url/#reply
Anyone knows how can it be achieved?
Thanks,
What I posted above works, but remember you don’t need to be on a specific topic to reply to it.
If your requirement is “must navigate to topic page, and then open the composer to reply”, then we don’t have that… but again it’s not required, you can reply to any topic from any other topic (or any location in the Discourse app, in fact) in the composer.
That post only mentions new-topic, where is the handy url to post a reply?
I believe there is one, cc @techAPJ
I’m aiming to use that link outside of Discourse. For example, putting a link on my blog, and when clicked it opens a new tab and starts a reply on a particular topic of the forum.
Is there a way to do it?
Thanks for your help.
Yes, the answer above works as you describe. Perhaps @techapj can help me explain because I seem to be failing at explaining this at the moment.
The feature we have right now only supports creating new topic via URL.
What @magoz wants is to have a URL for an existing topic that will open composer and user can start replying on that topic as soon as they visit that URL. This is currently not available and is not on my list right now.
Should we add support for this feature?
Not sure about it seems very uncommon
My bad @magoz I was indeed misunderstanding. I could have sworn we had a pre-filled reply URL though.
Apologies for my late reply.
Opening the composer (in a blank state) from an URL would be useful for those who have external websites working with Discourse and ask their users to reply to a particular Discourse topic.
For instance, I have a private website where I teach online lessons. I ask my students to reply to specific discourse topics to introduce themselves, to post their homework, etc.
It would be nice to be able to add something like ?reply at the end of any topic’s URL, and share that link with them.
For example:
<a href="https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-open-reply-window-via-url/44781?reply">link</a>
It would open a new reply to that topic with the composer open.
I would love to see it, too. Including template-support for answers, so it’s not just for topics 
Is this possible now?
We would love to see this feature as well 
Would it take a lot of extra work to make this possible, if it’s not already?
Some of our community members are thought leaders or SMEs that run YouTube Live sessions, which is okay (at best) for Q&A and turrrrrible for deeper discussion.
We want to be able to direct users to post their questions to an existing Event Topic (where we’ve used the events plugin) and have the reply window pop up, and ensure that the folks with the questions are posting to the respective SMEs topic.
One of our big value adds to a lot of the folks we’re working with is that we provide a place where they can engage with their users in deeper discussion.
When they do a YouTube or FB live, they are merely STARTING the conversation. Discourse is the perfect tool to CONTINUE the conversation.
If we could simplify the process by having giving a direct URL that people can click, and we can pre-open the reply dialog box, and pre-fill it with some boilerplate text, that would be so helpful!!
Same. It would be super-useful for our community.
I use a simple theme component for this in my instance. Below is an adaptation from mine – which also accepts #upload (a new reply opening the upload window on desktop) and #edit (for wiki OPs) in addition to #reply.
It needs some work, like avoiding setTimeout and correctly managing draftSequence (I don’t think topic.draft_sequence is right), and I don’t know what would be the best practice here. That said, it’s working fine for me.
Navigating to any topic like /t/[slug]/[id]#reply will open the composer with a new empty reply.
If you need some pre-filled text it is doable by setting the reply attribute on the object passed to composer.open. Plus, if there’s already a draft for that topic, it will ask if you want to save/discard it before creating this new reply – draftSequence needs to be correct if the desired behavior is resuming that draft.
<script type="text/discourse-plugin" version="0.4">
if (/.*#reply$/g.test(document.URL)) {
const { REPLY } = require('discourse/models/composer').default;
const composer = Discourse.__container__.lookup('controller:composer');
setTimeout(function() {
const topic = Discourse.__container__.lookup("controller:topic").get("model");
if (topic) {
composer.open({
action: REPLY,
draftKey: topic.draft_key,
draftSequence: topic.draft_sequence,
topic,
});
}
}, 0)
}
</script>
I hope that helps.
Have you changed / updated this since? It would be really useful - I’ve just found a use-case for it in my instance:
giving people a nice one click way to reply to a banner topic
The only change I recall doing was enforcing the login flow if the user isn’t already logged in, something like:
if (!Discourse.User.current()) {
Discourse.__container__.lookup("route:application").send("showLogin");
}
I still use it in my community to take users from my React app directly to some of these flows on Discourse (reply, edit, upload, etc).