Is there a way to stop older topics from appearing at the top when someone has recently commented on them? I mean something like a proper feed that doesn’t rely on the last activity.
AI-generated summary
In a Support category discussion titled Stopping older topics from resurfacing, MihirR asks if there’s a way to prevent older topics from jumping to the top due to recent comments, preferring a feed ordered by topic creation date rather than last activity. Canapin suggests appending ?order=created to the URL or using a theme component RGJ recommends. pfaffman notes muting topics is an option, though MihirR clarifies they want a global solution, not per-topic. Ed_S suggests locking or resetting bump dates, but MihirR explains they want ongoing topics to remain visible only to those who’ve engaged (e.g., replied or liked), similar to social media feeds. Canapin questions how “interacted” is defined, noting that limiting visibility to repliers might exclude new users. MihirR agrees new users can search if needed and reiterates the desire for a social-media-style feed. Ed_S frames this as a feature request for configurable feed sorting — by newest topic rather than newest reply — since Discourse prioritizes conversation continuity. MihirR concludes by thanking participants and noting the current workaround works for now.
On what would it rely? Topic creation’s date?
You can append a query string to do this: https://meta.discourse.org/latest/?order=created
But I don’t think there’s such a filter directly available from the navigation.
You could mute it.
It’s considered proper to show you topics with new posts unless you indicate you don’t want to see that topic anymore.
Mute would work for a single topic, right? Instead, is there an option that prevents it from resurfacing all the topics?
I assume you’re asking as an admin and you want to change this for all users.
Perhaps locking/closing topics is the answer?
Or if this is just an infrequent situation, as admin you can ‘reset bump date’ to put a topic back down to where it was.
Locking or closing the topic could work, but that’s not really what I’m going for here. I don’t want to close it, but I don’t want it constantly jumping to the top either. It can be kind of annoying in a community with lots of users. Since I’m not tracking the number of replies, spamming or multiple posts (like 5-7) can happen. What I’d prefer is for those posts to be notified to only to the people who’ve already interacted with them, instead of them always showing up at the top of the page. It just looks a little off.
If you want to sort by creation date, this theme component will take care of that Created Topic Sort
How do you define “interacted with”? Read (reading is an interaction)? Like/react? Reply? Quote into another post? Linked to?
If it’s just replying, it might mean new users miss out on old topics unless they jump in and reply. What you’re asking is a bit vague and needs more clarity. 
Of course, not reading, that would be a ton of notifications! 
You’re right, they would miss out, but they can always search for old topics if they need to.
I actually mean something like the feed on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
I’ve seen two approaches to feeds
- order by new posts, so you don’t see new contributions to commentary but you do see the newest memes
- order by new contributions, so you might see too many ongoing conversations but you don’t miss anything
I’m sure there are others. Discourse orders by new contributions - it’s the conversation which is important, not the head post.
I think then this is a feature request, for a configurable option to order by newest topic, not by newest response.
Thank you for sharing this. For now, this works great :))