Tried searching but couldn’t find anything. Can the order be changed to newest first within a topic?
Some forums have huge topics with hundreds of pages of answers and are IMO better read with newest-first order, where you don’t really care about the old ones.
If a topic has hundreds of pages of answers and it does not matter to the reader what was said in the beginning, it does not represent quality content. In quality discussions every contribution counts.
Discourse already provides the function of beginning the reading experience where you ended it.
Why would it not be necessary to read all these posts in-between? What makes latest posts more valuable?
Edit: If you don’t care about the old posts, you would not keep scrolling to read them. Do you only want to see the latest updates like, for example, I would want to read in a “news” feed aimed at entertaining me?
AFAIK this would require a plug-in or modification to the core codebase to implement. As a work-around, each topic has the green “progress bar” in the lower-right. You can always click the down arrow to be taken to the last post in the topic.
Also, in case you didn’t catch it from @pyro240’s response:
In other words, Discourse keeps track of your reading position. For example, if a topic has 40 posts and you read 30 of them, it remembers that. If the topic gets 40 more posts while you’re away, it will start you at #30 so you can pick up where you left off. I know that’s not a direct response to your query, but it’s useful and cool. 
You can also enter a topic at the first post or last post by clicking the appropriate date in the Activity column on the far right.
@codinghorror That’s actually really cool. It loads last x posts and then I can scroll back up. Never seen this before. I think that fits my use case pretty well.
Still, it would be awesome if I could tick a checkbox in the topic settings menu and allow it to show entries in reverse order. It would be awesome for twitter-like topics where there is no logic flow between posts and it is preferred to show newest entries first.
Reverse order option would be nice – I was hoping to use it for a changelog.
Its a very complicated change, probably a week of work to wire it up properly without having stuff like collapsed streams, deferred loading and so on working.
That can be useful for embedding a live discussion, for events like a webinar. In those cases you would want the last comments on the top, or the autoscroll of some kind.
Still no updates on this one 6 years later? I miss it badly! 
There are still no plans to add alternative orderings in to topics (order by likes, order by date desc and so on).
This request very infrequently comes up and it is exceedingly complicated to design.
You can experiment with this plugin but the maintainer hasn’t got much time to provide support.
Hi Sam,
Is displaying in reverse order now possible in Discourse?
Thanks
This is still not possible, and also not something we’re currently looking to implement.
We have two use cases that would benefit from this:
We have Topics that serve as announcement channels. e.g. “New Features in Gitlab” is a topic, and anytime there is a related updated someone posts a reply to that specific topic. Currently the oldest announcement is the first thing a new reader will see. What the user actually wants is the most recent announcement. A moderator/admin setting to reverse the order for a specific topic would put newer announcements to the top
AFAIK Discoures calendar works by adding a new reply with date to add a new entry to the calendar.
This results in the most recent calendar entry being the furthest away reply. In my personal calendar, the latest entry is about 200 replies down. I can use the timeline, but it would be lovely to have the latest entry at the top instead of all the way down.
Since scroll to the bottom is an available function, why not allow a setting that invokes it right away rather than as a user action? Or maybe it could be an automation?
That would achieve the desired result of getting every reader to the bottom and most recent without actually changing the order of replies.
I could see this being a decent alternative, though with Calendar, I think reverse order would still be advantageous. It would let a user look at the calendar, then scroll down one or two items to see the most recent event entries. Currently, I need to jump down 200 entries to see the most recent event.