Help:DiscussionTools/Why can't I reply to this comment?

Discussion pages have no limits on the available formatting. While DiscussionTools is able to recognize comments in most cases, there are some situations where it's ambiguous or impossible to tell whether some fragment of the page is a comment, or where the reply to it should be added. Whenever the correct behavior isn't clear, the tool will not allow replying rather than guess and potentially further mess up the page.

This page documents some of the errors you might encounter, their causes and solutions.

(no "reply" link appears)
You'll see this when the signature for that comment could not be detected. Signatures must include a link to the user page and a date and time.

The "reply" link cannot be used to reply to this comment
You'll see this error message when the comment appears to be transcluded from another page, but the tool can't determine from which page, and therefore can't determine where to add your reply. This can be caused by:

Could not find the comment you're replying to on the page
Usually this error message indicates that someone else removed the comment from the page while you were reading it. It might have been reverted, archived, moved to another discussion page, or the signature might have been changed (e.g. if someone commented while logged out and then corrected the username, or if they expanded their comment and signed it again).

If you can still see the comment after refreshing and purging the page, and you still receive this error, it might indicate a bug in Parsoid causing it to render the page differently from the PHP parser (DiscussionTools uses Parsoid internally to add new comments). Please file a task!

Comments on this page can't be replied to because of an error in the wikitext
You'll see this error message when there is a lint error on the page caused by fostered content. Editing these pages using tools that rely on Parsoid, such as DiscussionTools or VisualEditor, can cause the content to be corrupted (large fragments of the page become duplicated).

To resolve this, you can fix the lint error in the wikitext editor. The error message includes some links that hopefully are helpful.