Is the feature even that important? The only thing it adds to something a user could do with CTRL+F is the syntax >>9 shows.

Yeah, I'm not too fond of the replies link either, but it does make the feature much more accessible. If the reply number wasn't already used for the quoting, I'd use that. Can anyone think up any other more elegant way to do this?

Well, that's ugly, but at least it doesn't break things entirely, since the link to 1, does work... But let's look at the regexp. I'm using this right now:

/(?:[0-9\-,lrq]|,)+/

One quick but slightly clumsy solution would be something like this:

/(?:[0-9\-,lrq]|,)*[0-9\-lrq]/

That would require the last character to not be a ,.