I recently got a popup box telling me that I have replied too many times in a particular topic and should back off to let others in the community participate. It seems to me that this nag carries over from comment forums where a few gabby people can so dominate that they drown others out or conduct personal conversations in the general forum. But it is hardly relevant when I am trying to help someone by responding to followup questions they raise, which is what the vast majority of topics here are like! The followups are part of the solution to the OP’s question and taking them offline would deny other readers the full answer.
Could this “feature” of Discourse be turned off?
Yes, I’ve seen it as well, and it is a “bit” annoying.
Perhaps (hoping) that Discourse is smart enough that if you are replying to a specific post, poster, or quoting from the thread (rather that just adding a post,) … that the engine would be smart enough to not be “nagging.”
This particular bit I find the most annoying, it defeats the purpose of a forum, information should be available to all readers, not discussed behind closed doors.
I’ve recently been assisting a user who is obviously a computer naif; who can mess up even when given step-by-step instructions. So the number of messages back and forth necessarily became large, and I repeatedly got the nag popup. We finally took our discussion off line to PMs because I got sick of the nag.
I feel that was inappropriate and unnecessary because someone else might learn or have their problem solved by reading our discussions.
As I wrote in the post that started this topic, I think this “feature” came from general discussion forums and is completely inappropriate for a support forum such as this one - especially since, as others have noted, the Discourse software is completely incapable of determining whether the multiple responses are followups to try to finish solving the OP’s problem as opposed to people just chatting endlessly, which was the purpose of the trap. It sometimes requires multiple exchanges to cut through to the heart of the matter.