I find it all too easy to accidentally compose a reply to whoever posted earlier in a thread when I meant to reply to the topic. Or sometimes I make the opposite mistake.
One solution is to delete the old post and re-create the post with the proper reply attribution, but that is likely to trigger a “Body is too similar” message, plus it leaves the “24 hours” stub hanging around.
Might it be feasible to provide some means of altering whether a message is a reply to another message or not?
Yes this is already possible – just click or tap the reply button you want to change it to, and it will change, provided you have not submitted the reply yet.
Notice the line above the editor which says
reply to post #316 by Jorpho
it will change to
reply to {title of topic}
if you tap the reply button on the topic while the editor is open. It will change to
[quote=“codinghorror, post:2, topic:41433”]provided you have not submitted the reply yet.[/quote]Well, yes, that’s the thing – usually I only notice after I’ve replied.