I personally find the UX around whispers confusing.
To create a whisper, I “Toggle whisper [on]”.
Once I post my whisper, my next reply defaults to whisper mode. Okay, that’s kinda cool. But to turn whisper mode back off, I would expect to re-toggle it (toggles generally do go in 2 directions…). Instead I have to “Reply to topic”.
I believe clicking Toggle whisper again also turns it back off, are you trying this and it is not working? See a gif below where it works just fine for me.
Before I’ve posted the first whisper I can toggle it back and forth. It’s when I reply to a whisper that there’s a problem:
Welcome back @ganncamp 
This is by design. If you’re replying to a public post, your reply can either public or as a whisper. If you reply to a whisper, your reply will have to be a whisper.
It’s not possible to reply to a whisper publicly.
When I read a thread, I read all the way to the bottom. And then, once I’m completely caught up, I’m ready to respond either publicly or privately.
So I hit the closest “Reply” button.
If the last item in the thread happens to have been a Whisper, then I seem to be “stuck” in whisper mode. (It took me quite a while to figure out the right dropdown option to break out of that.)
Surely it’s not by design that after having read my colleagues’ back-channel chatter I must choose the correct Reply button when I’m ready to respond to the user?
In the forum I moderate, in a case where, like you, I have read all the way to the bottom I hit the reply button for the topic, not for the individual post.
That’s because I am not replying to that particular post (in your case a whisper post) but to the topic itself. In that case it works as one would expect.
I love the Whisper function, it has made it possible to collaborate with the other mods in a super fast way and everybody is looking at the same thing. Just great.
I do the same as well.
If you’re replying to the topic - either publicly or as a whisper - you should use the topic reply buttons here.
Both of those are “reply to the topic” buttons where you can toggle whispers on/off.
If the last post is a whisper and you click here
Your reply will always be a whisper because you’re replying to the post, not the topic.
Thanks for the input.
I was attempting to report a perceived UX problem. The consensus seems to be that the problem is on my end. Most of you have learned the tool. Silly me thinking that I shouldn’t have to. That it should just work.
