A discussion titled “Replied post doesn’t display as such” began when Sören_Geier reported an issue where replying to certain posts doesn’t create a “reply” post. JammyDodger suggested that this might occur when replying to the post directly above, which hides the “in-reply-to” avatar due to a default setting.
Sören_Geier thanked JammyDodger for the feedback and planned to test the setting. codinghorror explained that the default behavior is to reduce noise in the content, as most replies are to the post directly above.
Thomas_Bushell shared that this default behavior had caused confusion among users at the JustinGuitar Community, including himself, and had mistakenly reported it as a bug. JammyDodger acknowledged that it can catch people out and noted that there are admin settings to toggle this behavior.
Thomas_Bushell and JammyDodger discussed the potential effects of enabling this setting, with JammyDodger describing it as “surprisingly noisy.” Thomas_Bushell expressed concern about the potential impact but was reassured by JammyDodger that it is safe to toggle the setting on and off without causing significant issues.
Apparently replying to certain posts doesn’t create a “reply”-post but just a normal-looking post despite the fact that I even got a notification about a reply from someone.
I cannot fully reproduce the behavior but it seems to happen more often with replying to posts that were just added to the page (Ajaxy) versus posts that were there on page-load.
I am on a hosted environment, assuming latest production code.
I created a video:
Is it when you reply to the post directly above? That normally hides the little avatar ‘in-reply-to’ in the top right corner. You can change that by using the suppress reply directly above setting:
There are a couple more ‘suppress reply’ settings too:
great, I will test this. Thanks for the feedback
That’s because it would be incredibly noisy.. most replies are in fact replies to the post directly above them. So that defaults to off to reduce repeated noise text metadata in the content.
This default behaviour has caused confusion to several users over at the JustinGuitar Community - including me..
So much confusion that I - mistakenly - reported it as a bug.
I think it does occasionally catch people out. 
If you check out the Related Topics feature at the bottom of the topic you’ll see a few other examples over the years:
There are the settings noted above you can ask the admin to toggle to see if you/they’d prefer the opposite behaviour, though I tried it myself once to test it out and it is surprisingly noisy for not much extra info. I think once people know what’s happening it does make a lot of sense to ‘clean the screen’ and simplify what’s shown, but having the admin options is great if people want to try what including them would look like.
Noisy? How so?
I thought the only difference would be that users would always see what you call “the little avatar ‘in-reply-to” in their reply.
Is there some other visual clutter, or additional notifications, etc when this option is enabled?
Yeah, I did see those topics. Obviously, we are not the only people who did not expect this behaviour. Probably many more who haven’t filed “bug” reports like I did. Though I glad to see that this has been addressed with a config option…maybe the Justin devs don’t know about it.
I was worried that all hell might break loose if this were turned on. As a former dev, I’ve certainly seen situations where changing some seemingly innocuous setting causes a complete rebuilding of the message database, massive increases in storage requirements, and similar carnage.
I was reassured in my other thread that this would not happen. Was that your experience as well?
Don’t worry, it’s pretty safe. If you don’t like the look of it you can just toggle it/them back off again. 
