It appears that there’s no way in Discourse to have multiple replies “in progress” at the same time. I was just now writing an extended reply to a complex conversation, and I wanted to take a breather and do something else. So I read a few other threads, some of which warranted a short reply - but when I tried to do so I got asked “do you want to abandon your current message?” Ironically enough, that also happened when I tried to post this question
I regularly write “draft” responses to threads, often wanting to leave them overnight to give me a chance to think about them before posting. It looks like this isn’t a practical option in Discourse.
This sucks, and is in direct conflict with the idea that Discourse is trying to encourage better thought out and more in-depth replies. I’m struggling to think of any justification for this limitation (other than “you shouldn’t use Discourse for complex conversations” )
You tried to reply to the same topic. Discourse supports multiple pending replies, as long as it is to multiple topics.
I tested this with this reply, I started this, then also started a response in a different topic. Then I returned to this topic and hit ‘reply’ again. It then did ask if I wanted to abandon the reply I was already writing.
So, don’t abandon that reply, but either combine things in a single reply to that topic, or store the contents somewhere else until you are ready to add the longer reply in the same topic.
Maybe there’s a way to make it work (I’ll try when I have more time), but being in the middle of a reply, then selecting a new topic, leaves the old reply visible and you can’t do a new one. I just tested it and it definitely works like that. At best, the correct way to do this is not easy to discover if you get it wrong initially.
In general, I consider it a bad sign if I have to find my own workarounds outside of a tool to deal with a tool’s deficiencies…
