Patterns of behaviour by a user are best described through evidence, not opinion - “MemberX gets overly aggressive when discussing chicken nuggets” is opinion, whereas 3 or 4 of his posts where he’s doing this and copied in tell their own tale.
Actual posts provide a better aide-mémoire, also permit pattern-recognition for words used, arguments made, etc., which are useful if I suspect new user MemberZ is former suspended MemberX.
This is not hypothetical, word-use is a good way to detect someone returning for a second round of the same behaviour early on.
A topic that bloats due to some kind of problem can end up with some posts in one or more PMs, where they are then inaccessible to anyone not invited, if I used that method to both remove the content and request the user to not do it again; other posts may be deleted (requiring click to the link, 2nd click to open deleted), and further posts may end up being split into a new topic.
Aside from the need to click-through, this disjoints the flow of conversation and makes it harder to follow, which is why I copy conversations in directly using quote/screen captures.
If clone/copy cannot be done, I don’t see me ceasing the previous practice of copy-pasting my documentation in favour of links, because that’s storing up work for the future, and where I have done that rather than copy in quotes, I ended up resenting my former slackerdom, when it was necessary to go over the material again.
Replacing documentation with a narrative based on perception doesn’t appeal, either.
So, copy-paste will remain my solution, which is time-consuming. C’est la vie. 
Thanks, it should do most of what I want, I have passed the request along to the admin of the forum I moderate. 
Thanks.
Where would I have found this information? If it’s not somewhere obvious that I overlooked (which is always possible), can the link be placed on the Dashboard?
I think other forum moderators may find this useful, I don’t know what percentage of Discourse forum moderators follow this forum.
That’s great, thank you, but:
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Is unexpected to be able to search posts without entering a search term – because that cannot be done from the search box at the top of the page on a Discourse forum, nor is it normal behaviour for most search - you need a term to search for, and who it was posted by is the refinement, not the other way round.
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To do this requires:
- be at Profile
- open Search as a page
- type in full or partial name of user
- select them from drop-down menu
- scroll to calendar (remembering which date the person first posted from their profile), enter date
- still can only sort results by Latest Post/Latest Topic
- scroll down through results, using browser’s scroll bar, so not able to use the convenience of the scroll within the page found on topics
- no immediate way of knowing if the “50+” means you’re going to have to scroll down 51 topics, or 251, and if you want to get a feel for their posts by reading them in chronological order, that’s a long scroll down, and a slow read back up.
It’s doable, for sure.
But, I hope you understand why I was hoping for a simple “Oldest first” option, right on the Activity page.