Hi

I was just wondering whether it would be easy to make the thread that was changed most recently to get to the top of the list. Right now I usually have to look at all the numbers to determine which thread got some new replies. ...not that that is an incredible amount of work, but having the most recently changed thread at the top would definitely be cool:)

Cheers

David

Well that change was made quickly... as it is now showing it that way for me... This is something I was wondering about too since most other forums use this method and it seems the most logical to me (with perhaps the necessary sticky-type feature to keep older important messages on/near the top)

Thanks again, team.

We actually didn't implement this change. We've been debating it back and forth, but are a bit worried that older threads that people love to talk about forever will keep getting bumped to the top, while decreasing visibility for new topics. It also makes finding topics harder, because there's no consistent ordering any more.

When building the forum, we took this article as a starting point:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html

What do you guys think?

We'll probably have to do something to make it easier to see which threads have new stuff, though. We've been relying on visited link color so that your browser marks it when you've seen that thread with that number of comments, but that doesn't work when you use multiple browsers or computers to read the forum. I don't think it's going to scale to keep track of which posts you see while logged in.

Maybe we will implement the other ordering and see how it goes (although not right now because there is still The Bug).

I like the Joel way

I read, well, most of the article and a lot of it made sense. I don't know whether I skipped the part that would answer the following question: if you are afraid of the forum becoming too messy as in one can't find certain topics, wouldn't it be a good idea to have some general topics which set the range of threads (improvements-social-learning chinese- off topic- praise to the skritter...for instance)?

David

There is a problem with feedback loops - so that the most commented upon articles are the ones that rise to the top, and because they are then more visible, they get more comments. This happens on websites that allow you to favourite articles as well. So I think I prefer the date ordering. But at the same time, it might be possible to have a list of recently commented threads, so that you can see at a glance where conversation is at the moment (but without effecting overall ordering)

I think that subdivision by topic makes a lot of sense, as David suggests.

All the best,

Will

Effecting? I meant affecting. Tsk, tsk. Go to the bottom of the class.

Okay, I've added the ability to sort by update. The forum is set by default to order by creation date, so that we still have emphasis on checking out the newest topics. But you can see what has been updated recently by clicking 'Updated' at the top of the table. Hopefully that will give us the best of both worlds!

As for separating the forum by categories, we basically wanted to err on the side of seeming crowded rather than seeming empty. By having one big place for all conversations, it shows just how much use this forum gets. And we added the Google custom search so that if you're looking for something in particular you can use that, rather than navigating a tree of categories.

Having said that, we could assign topics to a category, having the first page be all categories, then let users pick a category they want to browse.

I just tried updating it, and I got an error message...maybe I was to quick and you haven't yet finished all of it ? :)

David

Google hasn't finished building the data index yet, it seems. It should start working at random in the next few hours.