V8 Nope that was definitely different. This was a SQL index issue. So the post never got inserted. What you guys experienced was that the post got inserted but something else caused an error message, making it look like the post never got inserted.
That's a logic flaw in Flarum. Essentially, their code is saying: If there's any error at all during the posting process, then return an error. (So even a notification email not being sent for a reply, constitutes an error.)
Hopefully they'll fix that in the next major release.