When a scheduled topic is published, what happens to replies to that topic?
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.
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:
- It is kind of confusing.
- It reveals that the topic was private and some subset of people had prior discussion (and gives an indication of how long)
- If, in the future, a different topic is merged into the scheduled one and âpreserve chronological orderâ is selected, _one of those replies will suddenly become the âOPâ
For what itâs worth, I think a âdelete all replies when publishingâ checkbox would be a lovely addition to this.
I believe the replies all get the same date as the OP. Not sure on how that interacts with the new âpreserve chronologyâ merge feature, but Iâll give it a test. Itâs still a bit of a giveaway that itâs not accrued replies in the normal fashion though.
Iâve 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 didnât affect the existing order and do anything weird when I selected to preserve the chronology.