Just a quick note on this as I encountered the same (or a similar) problem. I'd guess this person almost certainly wasn't using the announcement or news forum in error as this problem does indeed occur as described with the standard Forum activity. It relates to group settings and problems when you change them after creating a Q&A forum with groups enabled. Perhaps someone will read this and acknowledge it as a bug or more likely explain how to fix it in a better fashion than I did.
If you create a Q&A forum object with Group mode set to Separate Groups but aren't using grouped users, the missing 'reply' link issue will occur as outlined in the Forum FAQ and here.
If you switch the group mode back to no groups for the course and you're not using grouped students, the 'reply' link will be missing still from the Q&A forum. The issue appears to be in the actual question in that forum. The question itself retains a setting for observing group mode that you can't change to no groups. As a result, student role users still can't see the 'reply' link.
It's easy to fix by creating a new forum question with the same content (i.e. a new prompt question) as it won't have that Group setting available to cause the problem. Of course, if a forum has a bunch of content that might be more difficult, but with new forums it's not an issue.
I might be missing something here, of course, but posted in case it's helpful to anyone else who just spent an hour scratching their head.
If you create a Q&A forum object with Group mode set to Separate Groups but aren't using grouped users, the missing 'reply' link issue will occur as outlined in the Forum FAQ and here.
If you switch the group mode back to no groups for the course and you're not using grouped students, the 'reply' link will be missing still from the Q&A forum. The issue appears to be in the actual question in that forum. The question itself retains a setting for observing group mode that you can't change to no groups. As a result, student role users still can't see the 'reply' link.
It's easy to fix by creating a new forum question with the same content (i.e. a new prompt question) as it won't have that Group setting available to cause the problem. Of course, if a forum has a bunch of content that might be more difficult, but with new forums it's not an issue.
I might be missing something here, of course, but posted in case it's helpful to anyone else who just spent an hour scratching their head.
