Most of you probably don't care, nor will it affect anyone, but just putting it out there 
There were three significant UX changes that happened with v3, that alter how users interact with posts:
- The Harmony theme hides the reply/quote/voting/post-tools buttons until you hover over the post.
- The post bar is sticky and floats at the top of the page.
- We enabled quick-reply by default.
Two unintentional effects:
- The former two changes disincentivize users from clicking the "direct reply" button; more users click the general reply button instead.
- The latter by default does not send a
toPid
, meaning any reply made using the quick-reply box is technically a reply to OP.
Both these effects mean more replies probably have toPid
set to OP instead of to a more accurate value.
For forums, and especially for NodeBB, this doesn't really much matter. Posts contain a toPid
mostly as a curiosity, and posts themselves are ordered by their post time (unless changed by the user setting).
As part of my research into federated instances, I've realized that it would be incorrect for us to send in those values as topics would unintentionally end up shallow, with many small threads branching off of the main post (when in reality, there may be fewer, but longer, discussion threads).
To resolve, I will likely change the behaviour of the quick reply box to automatically act as a reply to the LAST post.
Optionally, if the "direct reply" button is clicked, instead of opening the composer, I could change the toPid
of the quick reply box, and redirect focus to that control instead.