Straight question: I get the aforementioned message every time I try to edit this user talk page. What is happening?
Topic on Talk:Talk pages project
Apparently there were linter problems on the page header. No special reason. Can the message be a tiny bit more informative? By what was being said, all this time I've suspected that the user had somehow opted out of the tool being used at its userpage, not that something else was preventing it.
There is more detailed documentation here: Help:DiscussionTools/Why can't I reply to this comment?#The "reply" link cannot be used to reply to this comment. The message is somewhat vague, because the tool doesn't really understand the problem – it just exits when the page does something weird with templates, to avoid damaging pages. (And also, we don't want to overwhelm users with long technical explanations.)
By the way, there is a separate (and more detailed) message when you can't reply because of a lint error: Help:DiscussionTools/Why can't I reply to this comment?#Comments on this page can't be replied to because of an error in the wikitext
@Doug Weller: This is what I found about not being able to use the reply helper. When you weren’t able to use it for replying to me, were you posting to my Talk page, or there in the article Talk page? Either way, given how I’ve never tried to customize anything, I think it’s just being mean. ~~~~
Article talk page. I can probably understand meanness more than I can lint errors. :)
@Strebe, @Doug Weller, can you post the link of the page you weren't able to use the reply tool? MAYBE I can provide a bit of help.
@Klein Muçi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Christopher_Columbus#:~:text=In%20the%20sciences,sources.%20Strebe%20(talk) Doug Weller (talk) 09:54, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi, I can’t post the link; I’m told: “<abusefilter-warning-linkspam>”. The article is the Talk page for Christopher Columbus on the English Wikipedia. Thanks. ~~~~
@Doug Weller, @Strebe, that's strange. Article talk pages usually are very standard so they RARELY have lint errors. And if you had a problem like that, the reply tool wouldn't be able to be used at all at that page, not in just one specific comment. I'm not sure what may be causing that specific comment to not have the link beside it. Maybe @Matma Rex, will be interested in this case.
I tried replicating the described situation as much as I could in my user talk page (https://sq.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=P%C3%ABrdoruesi_diskutim:Klein_Mu%C3%A7i&oldid=2379762#Test) but the tool works on all cases. :/
There’s no lint error in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Christopher_Columbus&oldid=1063069432&dtenable=1#c-Doug_Weller-2021-12-30T10:20:00.000Z-Doug_Weller-2021-12-29T09:59:00.000Z – that comment is simply not recognized as such. If you open the above, you see (with light blue background) what the reply tool thinks to be one comment. See Help:DiscussionTools/Why can't I reply to this comment?#No date and time. (By the way, Klein Muçi, not all lint errors affect the whole page. For example, Help:DiscussionTools/Why can't I reply to this comment?#Wrapper templates also is a result of a lint error, yet comments before and after the closed discussion can be replied to.)
Oh, so, to put it shortly, the answer is that that comment is missing date and time. Interesting. That's also the reason why I couldn't replicate the error in my page because there was a date and time there. (Thanks for the linter errors info.)
@Strebe, @Doug Weller, I guess that solves it. :)
@Klein Muçi,Sort of. I have no idea why it would not have dated my comment.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@Strebe, did you use the tool for adding that comment? Or was it added with the source code editor?
I used standard wiki markup with 4-tilde signature. Normally that adds the date.
@Strebe, maybe it was a human error then. Or not. The important thing is that now I assume we can say that the whole situation was outside the tool's fault.
Three tildes (an easy typo, when you meant to have four) will produce the user links without the date stamp.