We should always see who the user replied to

[alltiagocom]

A while ago I asked about this and I was informed on how things work.
To be honest, even though I understand how it works, I wasn’t and still am not convinced that this should be the default.

Look at this topic:

In this case, the reply from puridator had more context below, but I cut it just to show a case where a reply can be very ambiguous. If this was their actual reply, were they saying they are against what was said in the original topic? Or are they against what the mohammad user said?

Before anyone jumps in saying that they understand what was said in this particular case, this is just an example, of course. The reply could very well be just “I respectfully disagree with you”, increasing the ambiguity.

According to what I was told, if the reply is right below the person I’m replying to the reply doesn’t show the indication that it is a reply to a user, but if there’s a reply or more in between, it shows, the way we can see that mohammad replied to cpradio.

I think we should always see the reply, no matter what, to avoid confusion. It’s not the first time that I can’t really understand the reply, until a few lines in, which is a bit of a waste of “time” and energy to go back and forth reading something thinking it’s in one context, to then realize it’s a different one.

I believe seeing the reply indication, even if it’s right below the original one, just creates more clarity to the reader.

Hope you guys consider adding it. Adding it will not make it worse, but not having it, does, imo.

[Arkshine]

You can control this behavior with these settings:

[alltiagocom]

Thank you so much!!! You’re always a life saver!
I wish the person who explained how things work, would have told me about this setting

I will test it with all of those ON and then OFF to see how it looks like.

Really appreciate it!

[alltiagocom]

I’m a bit confused here…
I had to set it like this to view the indication on the reply below

If the default is that it hides the indication in the reply below the original post, why do I need to uncheck the option that says above?

Also, it’s a bit confusing that both options “title” is the exactly the same, with the only difference being the word “below” or “above”, and the description is practically the same with the only 2 difference being reply count on the top one, and in-reply-to on the bottom one. It took me a while to see those differences (apart from the words below and above, of course).

So what do those 2 mean? Reply Count and In-Reply-To?

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EDIT: Ok I guess I understand the above and below. It’s still a bit confusing how it’s worded, though. To make it clear, let’s call the posts Post A and Post B (the reply to Post A).
I was reading “Suppress reply directly above” as “In Post A, hide the indication” (which would be weird, because the reply is Post B), instead of “In Post B, hide the indication that this is a reply to Post A (which is directly above)”.

So we are left with the Reply Count and In-Reply-To. But in that case, if “Suppress reply directly above” now makes sense, I don’t understand the other option “Suppress reply directly above”?

[Arkshine]

The “reply directy below” refers to this:

By enabled it, it won’t show if there is only one reply and directly below that post.

[schneeland]

@alltiagocom

I think we should always see the reply, no matter what, to avoid confusion.

Now that you bring this up: I recently posted a reply here and meta and was then confused to not see it listed as reply, thinking I might have hit the wrong reply button.

@Arkshine

You can control this behavior with these settings:

It’s good to know that this can be changed. I’m not sure if the default is really a good idea, though.

[Arkshine]

I think the default makes sense in most cases, but sure, it can be confusing sometimes.

You also have this solution to always quote when you hit the reply button:

Quick Quote Theme Component

Summary Simply: it changes the behaviour of the Post Reply buttons (not Topic reply) to quote a Post automatically in a single click. Repository Link GitHub - merefield/discourse-quick-quote: A Theme component to change the behaviour of the Post Reply buttons to quote a Post automatically in a single click. Install Guide Installing a theme or theme component Sponsorship Please consider becoming an ongoing sponsor of m…

[alltiagocom]

@Arkshine

By enabled it, it won’t show if there is only one reply and directly below that post.

When I disabled it, it showed me the reply count, but when I enabled it, it doesn’t show the count, regardless of the number of replies below, so I’m not sure I’m following what this is supposed to do or if something is broken.

Either way, I won’t have it enabled, only the reply indicator.

Thank you for helping me with this. Now it looks great to me.

[alltiagocom]

@Arkshine

I think the default makes sense in most cases, but sure, it can be confusing sometimes.

From a UX/UI point of view, if something can be confusing to the user at times, then it shouldn’t be added, even as a feature people can turn on and off.

Does having it make it confusing? No. The reply is, well, a reply to a user, so it’s a good indicator, even if there’s more clutter. But we are already adding “clutter” to other replies, so it’s not another indicator that will make it feel cluttered, and it’s always a great way to avoid ambiguity, like the example I shared.

[alltiagocom]

@Arkshine

You also have this solution to always quote when you hit the reply button:

I think this one is what would cause a lot of clutter, specially in long replies.
And we have the option to do it manually anyway if we want.

I think the way it is now, with the reply indicator, just feels right to me

[schneeland]

@Arkshine

I think the default makes sense in most cases, but sure, it can be confusing sometimes.

I have thought a bit about this, but I tend to disagree because a) there’s no transparency about having used reply on a post vs. reply on a thread, and b) the behaviour is inconsistent between single and multiple replies. Also, as mentioned above, I also feel the behaviour is surprising, which is IMO not a good thing in terms of UX.

So I would argue that the default setting should be reversed and the reply indication should be shown also for single replies, with the option to turn this off if desired.

But I do appreciate you linking the Quick Quote theme component. My main concern there is that I consider it an advantage that Discourse discourages full quotes and encourages replies (with selective quotes as needed), because this keeps avoids (visual) duplication of existing content.

[alltiagocom]

@schneeland

My main concern there is that I consider it an advantage that Discourse discourages full quotes and encourages replies (with selective quotes as needed), because this keeps avoids (visual) duplication of existing content.

Agree. Especially when the full post being quoted is gigantic…
I see no advantage of using full post quote, and hiding the “replied to” by default.
At least that’s good that we have an option to turn those ON and OFF.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

Various good points here, as mentioned, some of the original ideas behind the features were reducing clutter and repetition.

One of the original thoughts was that every reply to a topic should be valuable to the topic rather than these sort of back-and-fourth discussion chains between specific people that require closer tracking.

In practice that can be hard to avoid, and it might be unreasonable to expect this sort of diligence everywhere… especially in an environment where other major platforms thread (which I’d argue is intended to suppress discussion because there are too many people involved).

What’s the problem?

To re-demonstrate the issues this un-supressed duplication causes:

• A full quote after the post feels silly

  

• Even sillier if you expand the “1 Reply”

  

• And when you expand “1 reply” and “replied to”… pure silliness:

  

This just looks confusing to me.

Suppression creates new problems

The behavior is entirely opaque to people using it, so as @schneeland mentioned, one might wonder “did I not reply correctly?” and there’s no obvious answer.

How might we solve it?

Personally I think we should eliminate the suppression options entirely and re-approach the issue with the goal of finding a default behavior that works well enough for everyone.

Replies above

When we have successive replies like this, perhaps we should change the behavior. Expanding to see the duplicate replies in these cases provides zero value, we know that… but the “in reply to” indicator can provide valuable context even in this situation:

I’m not agreeing with the topic there I’m directly replying to domenic. Now, I don’t need to see that expanded… but I could be wondering “hmm is this in reply to the post immediately above… or a different one domenic made”? Maybe here we just jump you to the post and highlight it temporarily to clarify (we already do post jumping on mobile)

If the gap between posts becomes larger, then we can then expand on click so you’re not losing your position. This feels like the best of both worlds to me.

Replies below

This feels a little trickier… because there may be many replies.

I think we could change the behavior to match the above when there’s only 1 reply in close proximity: scroll and highlight. Maybe that’s enough and the multiple reply behavior remains:

There's another problem with this view, but it's a bit of a tangent

This feature has created some confusion from time to time… at least a few people have seen this and think “hey Discourse supports threading”!

We also have a lesser-used separate mode for this that called Enable filtered replies view: Optional filtered replies view

When enabled, rather than showing embedded replies that look like a thread, we collapse unrelated posts to only show replies:

IMO this solves the “looks like a thread” problem and better represents the flat structure of the topic. But the experience doesn’t feel good enough to use as a default to me… perhaps we can do some enhancement and reconsider if we want to avoid the “looks like a thread” issue?