I wouldn’t say full consensus; I certainly don’t think that’s the best way. With that workaround, an alternative like Reddit is just so much better because there’s no duplication of text content.
I feel like my aforementioned suggestion just hasn’t been explained well enough. I made a video to properly illustrate what the posting process should look like:
There’s no hackery going on here. I’m merely skipping past the part where Discourse jumps to the bottom of the topic. Instead I transition to the filtered version of the topic with inline replies. The big question is whether this can easily be skipped in code as well.
My basic spec of the plugin would be:
- Add category-specific setting “enable AMA mode”
- “Reply (to topic)” is replaced with “Ask question”
- OP is the designated AMA host with special privileges
- Posts to the topic (i.e. Questions) by other users can only be replied after OP has replied. Before then, there’s no “reply” button visible to them.
- OP’s replies will be highlighted.
- All Replies (not Questions) will be hidden from the main stream by default. Instead they will be shown as inline replies by default. In other words this would be quite similar to how
?username_filters=someuserworks.