So in my mod, Brathus Dahl (that's his i.d.) is supposed to have a greeting, and in the resultbox it says:
brathus dahl->addtopic "where is quator?"

But the error conflitc button says that it's messed up, specifically it can't find the object reference for it. So i tried adding in a _ to make it brathus_dahl, thinking that it would work. it didnt. Anyone know a solution to this?

It should be "brathus dahl"->addtopic "where is quator?" Anything with a space (or spaces) must have quotes around it, otherwise the engine thinks you're referencing two (or more) different items.

[Edit]: you don't need to reference an NPC when you're using the addtopic command: just using the command and the new topic is fine: addtopic "where is quator?". Make sure that you spell the topic just like it is in the dialog database.

quote the reference

"like this"

should work.

You can enclose an id in quotes, which resolves the issue.

"brathus dahl"->addtopic "where is quator?"

However, known topics are kept in a global list rather than being specific to a actor. Hence it is probably better to do:

addtopic "where is quator?"

Note:
You can that it doesn't need a fix from Morrowind Scripting for Dummies, which gives the definition of add topic as:

[no fix] AddTopic, "Topic"

EDIT:
Beaten to the punch by Jac

Ah that make's much more sense now, Thanks for the help, it's invaluable as always

EDIT: Thanks, I didn't realize that you didn't have to make it i.d. specific. Yay

The logic behind unfixed AddTopic is that only the PC can known about and bring up topics (NPCs don't start talking about something at random). So, only one list you're adding to (the PC's known list).

And as Jac and Yacoby said, always quote your IDs. In the best case, having a space in it should be avoided, but that's not always possible with stock objects.

This makes much more sense now, thanks for clarifying