What happens to replies when a Scheduled topic is published?

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AI-generated summary

In a discussion about scheduled topics, mattdm asks what happens to replies when a scheduled topic is published. simon explains that replies — including whispers — are published alongside the topic, which can be useful for private pre-publication discussions. mattdm raises concerns about reply timestamps appearing older than the original post, noting this could be confusing, reveal prior private discussion, and potentially cause issues if merged topics preserve chronological order — possibly making a reply appear as the original post. mattdm suggests adding a “delete all replies when publishing” option. JammyDodger confirms through testing that replies receive the same timestamp as the published topic’s original post, and merging topics with “preserve chronological order” does not cause unexpected ordering issues. However, the uniform timestamps still subtly indicate the topic was scheduled rather than organically developed.

1

When a scheduled topic is published, what happens to replies to that topic?

2

Replies are published along with the topic. If replies are whispers, they will be published as whisper posts. That could be useful if you want to have a private discussion about the topic prior to publishing it.

3

What happens to the date of the replies? Do they become older than the first post? If so, this has two obvious problems and one less-obvious one:

  1. It is kind of confusing.
  2. It reveals that the topic was private and some subset of people had prior discussion (and gives an indication of how long)
  3. If, in the future, a different topic is merged into the scheduled one and “preserve chronological order” is selected, _one of those replies will suddenly become the “OP”
4

For what it’s worth, I think a “delete all replies when publishing” checkbox would be a lovely addition to this.

5

I believe the replies all get the same date as the OP. Not sure on how that interacts with the new ‘preserve chronology’ merge feature, but I’ll give it a test. :slight_smile: It’s still a bit of a giveaway that it’s not accrued replies in the normal fashion though.

I’ve given it a test run and the replies all got the same timestamp as the OP when it was published. However, when I created a new topic and merged the post into the Scheduled one it didn’t affect the existing order and do anything weird when I selected to preserve the chronology. :+1: