Iâve seen it a few times (includng yesterday), always in areas with comments enabled. See also this.
Same here on that exact post too.
Edit: I think perhaps weâre supposed to âcommentâ on the reply we want to respond to, rather than creating our own new response?
Apparently this is exactly what happens. If you add a general reply to the topic using the blue âReplyâ button at the end everything is fine. You can then even quote as many passages out of other posts as you like.
If you reply directly to the post of another user using the reply button under the post you will get the error messages because Discourse expects you to use the comment function instead.
I had the same error message and when I tried the different options this was the result.
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Just had a similar sort of an issue here: Irrelevant locality names - #3 by SimonPoole
Teknoboy added a comment to ask a question.
When I then added a comment to reply to them, it told me that Comments are limited to 600 characters, which isnât a lot.
I then added a reply Irrelevant locality names - #7 by Fizzie41 but there was no way of actually quoting his comment?
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Comments seem to be in general somewhat a 2nd class citizen in Discourse. In any case it would be nice if there was a way to convert comments to regular replies and the other way around.
Oh yes, and this is going to get some knickers in a knot: there doesnât seem to be a mechanism to report (or moderate in general) comments.
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⊠or even just select text and just click âquoteâ, actually, or as @dieterdreist found, reply by email.
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Correct, by doing so a direct reply to the post is startet, attracting the error message. Havnât tried the email thing but Iâm sure @dieterdreist is correct.
Looks like the only thing you can do is to copy text out of a comment and paste it into the reply window. If you want it to look good, you can even add the quote manually ⊠like in the good old days ⊠
), for instance
The plugin being used for Q&A is a great candidate for exploring if its development can be âsponsoredâ by OSMF and prioritize solving some of the issues commented on this topic.
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I have it too, see here and follow-up reply and itâs comment.
I think it is some unlucky configuration here on community.openstreetmap.org (âunluckyâ because the error message is confusing, only appears after having written the answer, and does not say what to do instead).
If it really is not wanted to post answers on answers, then I think it is important to make the user experience better: Tell straight away that it does not work and what do do instead.
Comments are also not a good solution since apparently they do not support every formatting (see âbrokenâ quote in the comment to this post) and they allow only up to 600 characters, making it difficult to express more complex stuff. Another suggestion is to allow comments to be as complex as posts.
a workaround is muting the Help section, this way you are not tempted to reply
Actually, I asked a question, and a reply asked something back, so I was due to reply.
An alternative might be to actually read the message before replying to it, and if itâs from âHelp and supportâ, donât reply to answers by email
That requires background information not easily available. You would need to know the specialities how this category. If this category behaves as it behaves, the functionality to reply to a post should just not be offered in the first place, if it does not work! I consider it as a bug if something is offered which at the end is declined.
Yes, my email also just got /dev/nulled. Please add a bounce message in that case!
⊠other than in the subject line of the email? 
OK, while âHelp and supportâ is in the subject line of every email from that section, strictly speaking people could turn post voting off there (or turn in it on in some other category), in practice no-one does, so you can tell which emails are OK to respond to and which are not.
That sounds like a feature request that is best directed at the authors of Discourse. It is not maintained by OpenStreetMap - we have enough to do mapping everything on the planet.
You would need to know that this category does not allow such stuff. This is kind of insider information.
You need to have looked at the web UI at least once to see what buttons are available, yes. I absolutely agree that Discourseâs UI is beware-of-the-leopard obtuse in a number of areas, and Iâm sure that the developers would be delighted at receiving code changes that would resolve those, as I mentioned earlier.
They only allow pull requests. That is beyond my skills. Issues are deactivated, so there is no easy way of just giving them feedback about obstacles encountered by using their software.
Can you, as you use the software, maybe delay the feedback to them? Do you have an email adress â I could write an email.
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Actually, I was using the Web-UI, I was using the quote-feature, it was available to me!
(And also this reply I tried to send via email, it did not arrive here, without getting me a bounce.)