As a complete aside: that’s actually solvable by the admins/mods/people with high enough trust level, by selecting messages (and replies) that go in wildly different directions, and moving them to separate topics; it’s one of the advantages of Discourse over email.
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That was discussed in the proposal to use Discourse for Change discussion, and folks were against it. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being silenced or their perspective is “less important.” This cannot be compared to proper threading support that email has.
Please excuse to move this to a new topic, but as already noted, the other topic becomes more and more hard to read, so let’s untangle the issues a bit 
Feel free to let me know if I missed a related post or if I shall change the topic.
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This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Discourse works, so I’m not surprised that people unfamiliar with it had reservations.
Moving side-discussions to a new topic is far from making them “less important”: it raises them to the same importance level as the original discussion.
On a mailing list you have to deal with changing the subject, which will hide the discussion unless the archival or mail client only obeys to the “In-Reply-To” header to maintain the threading—thus defeating the point. On Discourse, the original topic contains the link to the side-discussion, and everyone involved automatically gets moved there.
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Agreed. It’s unfortunate, but the reality is that people are resistant to change. Seems a bit odd to me in a distro as fast moving as Fedora it is still observed, but it is what it is. I gave up on the mailing lists years ago - reading though complicated topics became a PITA.
There are actually some changes we could make on the discourse side to make conversations easier to follow in my experience.
Specifically, unchecking these settings can make the conversation clearer about who is being replied to and allow to follow the thread of the conversation:
- suppress reply directly below
- suppress reply directly above
- suppress reply when quoting
- remove full quote
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I’m hesitant to change these — people tend to over-quote these days (especially replying via gmail, which makes this almost impossible to avoid), and I find that having gigantic, redundant quote blocks makes the conversation harder to follow rather than easier. I’m not seeing a big problem with context being lost, actually, in the current conversation.
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Yeah, see Proposal to move Change discussion from devel-list: technical implementation discussion - #24 by mattdm. We’re going through some experimenting with this one!
In that case, just remove the last one. The other 3 still have merit.
Eh…I am. All the time. Currently if you reply to the first post or the 20th post it looks exactly the same with no context what so ever. What the most of those settings impact is this:
I don’t see a good reason to remove that.
I’m replying to this message without quoting you…
And here I’m replying to the whole topic (to the first post).
And…they look identical 
Yes they do . How would the settings above change this?
As in the screenshot, your responses would have the person you are replying to in the corner. That is clickable and will show what you are responding to, you can even follow that link to the original post of you wanted it.
Like this.
Right now it only happens when I reply to something that is more than one post above mine but not the initial post. That leads to confusion as to what is actually being replied to.
EDIT: The triple post is deliberate for demonstration purposes.
Ahh, I get it. Okay, yeah, I’ll change the “suppress reply” settings. I’ll leave “remove full quote”, though, I think, for the reason I said.
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Ahh, look at that
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Interesting, it even fixed it historically.
I guess it always stores the data and only chooses not to display it.
Yeah, it’s in the post metadata. Thanks for the suggestion — I agree that this is an improvement.
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