Question "Reply" and "Reply Topic" the same...

Is there a way to disable the "Reply" button at the bottom of individual responses? I'd rather not have it there, as it is duplicated at the bottom. I'm assuming it's there so people can respond without having to scroll to the bottom of all the responses.

However I feel like it encourages people not to read the rest of the responses, which to my view adds confusion and takes away from the clarity of the threads. It makes it more likely there will be duplicate responses, which leads people to have to then reply saying, "That point was made by so and so...."

Hope that's helpful, and is there a way to disable that?

Actually, the Reply and Reply Topic buttons were originally designed to do different things but, because of a complication that arose around the time of Kunena 1.0.8 they now effectively serve the same purpose.

Before K 1.0.8 users had the preference to follow discussion topics in either a "threaded" (conversationally organised) or "flat" (chronologically organised) view; see image below:
image missing http://www.kunena.com/media/kunena/attachments/legacy/images/discussionThreaded.gif

The "threading" was achieved by the selective and judicious use of the the Reply and Reply Topic buttons.

Unfortunately, the threaded view caused other problems and the developers decided to disable the feature with Kunena 1.0.8. With the current [flat] view the two "reply" buttons have the same effect because messages appear in chronological sequence. However, it is planned to attend to the "threaded" view in a future version of Kunena. I would imagine there will be a future need to have a separate Reply to this posting button from the Reply to the original topic and start a new sub-thread button.

Thanks for your reply. It was quite a decision for me to decide which repy button to choose.

I am wondering, is it possible to disable the extra reply button, until the issue is straightened out. I'm thinking of my site visitors who are new to forums and are confused with the overwhelming amount of things to read and click and figure out.

I'd like to give them as friendly and simple a user experience as possible, and having the option to disable more of the forum features would be great in this regard.

Actually Reply and Reply Topic will have different behavior starting from Kunena 1.0.10.

That's great to hear! Thanks very much.

I'm sorry to say, that we had to postpone new moderator tools and all changes related to it.

We found serious security vulnerability (from FB) two days ago and we had to postpone all other tasks to fix it.

Well, K1.5 it is, then..