From the welcome message:
To take the conversation in a different direction, but keep them linked together, use Reply as New Topic to the right of the post.
I like the idea, since it allows spinoff topics to have their own topic but not clutter the original… but I can’t seem to find the option, just the two normal Reply options (one for the post, one for the topic). Am I missing something?
I see why you didn’t find the option, since it is hidden unless you hover over the post. You’ll see the option on the upper right corner of the post, next the the time since it has been posted.
See, that’s where I would expect it to be. But if I hover over things (I tried the post, the title, the timestamp…) nothing. I just can’t see the option.
What exactly are you hovering over?
Also, I’m using Safari 7.0.4 on OS 10.9.3. I tried it on Chrome and the option still doesn’t appear, but if I hover over the timestamp, I see the URL has reply-as-new-topic in it (odd, because Safari doesn’t show it, just #). But if I click the timestamp, it shows sharing options. EDIT: In fact it’s not strange it would show reply-as-new-topic in the URL - that’s the title of this post, not the actual reply as new topic URL. It’s just the permalink URL. Confusing when the option is the same as the post title.
What exactly are you hovering over?
The option appears when hovering the mouse over any part of the comment (text, username, avatar, etc).
I did a bit more research and it looks like the option doesn’t appear until you have a certain “trust level” in the Discourse system. It’s kind of like Stack Overflow’s “reputation” where the more you do, the more features become available.
Unfortunately, unlike Stack Overflow, it’s not clear why the option is unavailable (SO will show the option, but will tell you you need more reputation when you try to do something, instead of Discourse hiding options which leads to this kind of confusion where you have no idea why you can’t see an option that was supposed to be there). If it’s going to be used to hide or show features, it should be more prominent so users know to expect that some features may be missing until they use the system more.
Also, it appears notifications are significantly delayed, since I was just notified of your reply yesterday and you posted it over 2 weeks ago. So far I’m half impressed and half disappointed with Discourse. It has a lot of nice features but some details could use some tweaking.
I agree that it would be a great improvement for Discourse to better surface how its trust system works and how it affects what users can and can’t do. Currently, it may be an issue of the Discourse software still being a bit in flux - just last update requirements for promotion to trust level 1 (basically from a new user to a regular user) became a bit easier, and similar tweaks have happened in most of the recent updates. They’ve announced that they’re getting closer to releasing version 1.0 (on version 0.9.9.9 now), and with that I’d hope the features start to become a bit more static and easier to document.
We’re also still learning how the different trust levels work for our community, and making adjustments where we can as we learn what the balance between making sure folks can participate effectively but also preventing spammers and poor content. So far we’ve made a few minor tweaks, and we’ll most certainly continue to do so as we figure out what works best, but it might take a little time to get things just right as Discourse adds more features and we learn the best ways to cultivate the new forums.
As for the notifications - that was due to an issue with the background task processor Discourse uses called Sidekiq. Sometime in the past two weeks it’d stopped processing email notifications, but continued to queue them up. Once it started processing notifications again it sent out some of the old ones that had previously queued up and failed, causing some old notifications to be sent out. Notifications should be working again and you should receive them in a timely fashion. If you don’t, please make sure to let us know. Sorry for the confusion here!
