[New] Forums: No saved/canned replies for forum moderators (the macro exists in helpdesk but not forums)

Area: Forums (audit p2) · Surface: Reply composer / mod tooling (post-toolbar.php, MessageController modmail) · Dimension: competitor-gap · Severity: enhancement

Moderators of active communities answer the same questions repeatedly (rules, where-to-post, formatting help). Discourse 'canned replies', Zendesk macros, and Help Scout saved replies all let staff insert a pre-written response in one click — a major time-saver and consistency tool. We have AI drafts (which cost per call and vary) but no deterministic, zero-cost saved-reply library a mod can curate. This is a concrete throughput gap for the moderator persona, and the helpdesk side already proves the pattern is valued in-product.

Evidence

Forums have AI mod drafts (AIFeatureCatalog.php:80 ai_forum_mod_drafts) and a helpdesk has AI canned-reply ranking (:99 ai_help_canned_suggest mapping to helpdesk_ai_reply_suggest), but grep for canned|saved.?repl|macro across ForumController, post-toolbar.php, and templates/mod/forum returns no user-defined saved-reply store for forums. The only quick path is ForumController.php:2885 quickReply, which is an inline composer, not a template library.

Suggested fix. Add a per-forum (or per-tenant) saved_replies table (title, body, scope) editable by mods, surfaced as an insert-menu in post-toolbar.php's reply/edit composer. Optionally let the existing ai_forum_mod_drafts output be saved as a canned reply, bridging the two features.

Filed by the automated tenant-app audit and adversarially evidence-verified. Status: verified. Open — not yet actioned.