I bet this isn’t possible, more like a feature request for Discourse but: (EDIT: it’s possible! Yay!)
… show a “parent” link/action to jump to or show the post that another post is a reply to? Just the exact reverse of the way Discourse lets you quickly see the replies to a specific post within a topic…
Note that there’s also an up arrow to go view the actual parent comment, and a down arrow to expand (which does the same thing as clicking the name, or anywhere in between).
Even if we only copy/paste a short quote, as long as we mark it as a reply to the right comment, it’s workable
But using the built-in quoting gives extra options
And because you can expand to the whole post, we should really stick to the smallest quotes to make the context clear
This does reinforce my encouragement to post multiple replies so there’s some threading instead of enormous replies with multiple quoted bits all at once.
I think maybe this example topic should be highlighted / pinned or something so people can reference it even…
I think it matters (although room for case-by-case judgment) because if you see an original comment with a “# replies” part and click that to see the replies, it could be better to see one short reply to that versus seeing a huge reply that is actually a reply to many different comments… or rather, if you quote-reply as a topic-level reply (as you just did), then there’s no indication at the original comment of the reply (that I can find).
EDIT: maybe it doesn’t show the reply indication if the reply is the very next comment?
Good point. Specifically, I’m also realizing that a comment can only have one parent. Simply quoting a comment does not make it a parent; you have to click that comment’s reply button.
For example, if you go and show the replies of my first comment in this thread, it abruptly cuts off because I quoted you above instead of replying to your comment.
Right, so the quote function is nice in some ways, but it doesn’t provide the clean threading of actually posting smaller, separate replies that are actually marked as replies.
That said, if it were possible to get some “quoted below” link in the original comment that jumped to the quote, that would do it. Maybe that’s a feature that’s possible / plugin / request-for-Discourse?