Cross-cultural feedback on topic reply order and usability for older users

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1

I’m not sure whether creating a new topic for this is appropriate, because I’ve already searched the forum and found several similar discussions. However, I would still like to share my perspective, because I think this issue may involve cultural and generational differences in how people use forums.

What I hope for is a way for administrators to choose the default reply order in topics.

Currently, Discourse displays replies in chronological order, with the newest replies appearing at the bottom. Personally, I have no problem using this system. I am 30 years old, grew up in China, and I quickly understood how Discourse works.

However, most users of my forum are Japanese users between 40 and 60 years old. Their browsing habits are very different.

Many of them strongly prefer seeing the newest replies at the top of the topic instead of the bottom. This feels more natural and efficient to them.

Actually, Discourse already has a very good feature on mobile:
the reply count button in the lower-right corner opens a progress bar that allows users to quickly jump to different positions in a topic. Once I discovered this, I thought the design was excellent.

But interestingly, one of my heaviest users had been using the forum for 2–3 years and never realized this feature existed until I personally showed him.

This made me realize that discoverability may become a problem, especially for older users who are less sensitive to hidden or modern UI interactions.

There is also an interesting cultural difference regarding long discussions.

Japanese users are very accustomed to continuously replying within a single topic. When a topic reaches a certain number of replies (commonly around 1000 replies), they often create a new continuation topic manually.

For example:

“Do you prefer rice or bread for breakfast?”
→ “Do you prefer rice or bread for breakfast 2”
→ “Do you prefer rice or bread for breakfast 3”
→ “Do you prefer rice or bread for breakfast 4”

and so on.

This behavior is extremely common in older Japanese internet communities and BBS culture.

However, once a topic becomes very long (for example, several hundred or thousands of replies), the current progress bar navigation also becomes less precise and less convenient.

While the progress bar is useful for rough navigation, it becomes difficult to jump accurately to a specific area of the discussion.

Because of this, I would also like to suggest another possible improvement:

Perhaps users could optionally enter a reply number manually, allowing them to jump directly to a specific reply position inside the topic.

For example:

  • jump to reply #500
  • jump to reply #1200

I think this could significantly improve usability for users who frequently browse extremely long discussions.

Discourse, on the other hand, follows a very different design philosophy:
continuous scrolling instead of pagination.

I personally understand and appreciate this design. However, after listening carefully to my users, I started wondering whether the current reply order may unintentionally become a barrier for older users from certain cultural backgrounds.

Therefore, my suggestion is:

Allow administrators to choose the default reply order for topics:

  • chronological (oldest first)
  • or reverse chronological (newest first)

while still allowing individual users to override this preference themselves.

I believe this is not only a UI preference issue, but also a cross-cultural and cross-generational usability issue.

Thank you for considering perspectives from different cultures, age groups, and internet histories.

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2

I hope the Discourse team will consider this.
For example, if a topic has 50 comments, clicking on it takes you to the bottom to show the latest unread replies. However, at that point, I might only know the title. If I want to read the full details, I have to scroll all the way to the top and then scroll back down to comment.

If replies could be ordered from newest to oldest, with the latest reply displayed directly below the topic content, it might be more convenient to find the information needed.

3

It’s a single click on the right timeline. Or two taps on mobile scrolling widget.

Our nested replies feature has that.

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4

It’s a single click on the right timeline. Or two taps on mobile scrolling widget.

Or one hit on the Home or End key, without any modifiers. To me, this is the easiest UX action possible. Do the older users not have keyboards?

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5

I didn’t know you could click like that!

This is my first time knowing :+1: It’s very convenient.

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6

Indeed, “just do this” is only saying that something can be done. It doesn’t address discoverability at all. User stories of people not discovering the feature are saying much more.

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7

Yes, thank you for your understanding.
Differences in cultural background and age often lead people to develop different ways of thinking, and these differences naturally affect how users understand and interact with certain features.
As someone relatively younger, I may be more open to exploring and adapting to new things more quickly. Although the forums I used previously did not have a similar feature, I was still able to discover this clever design after repeatedly clicking around and experimenting with it.
However, some of my users are older, and due to long-established habits and patterns of thinking, they still did not notice the existence of this design even after extensive and frequent use.
In fact, even in this very thread, @jack222 only noticed the existence of this clever design after it was specifically pointed out.
This is also why I hope there could be an option allowing users to freely choose whether the latest replies are displayed at the top or remain at the bottom by default.
To be honest, although I suggested having the latest replies displayed first, my own usage habits are already adapted to the traditional layout where the newest replies appear at the bottom, so I personally did not experience any major inconvenience.
The reason I raised this suggestion was because, through conversations with users, I realized that this default sorting method actually goes against the long-established browsing habits of some users — and even an entire group of similar users — which makes the experience feel less intuitive and somewhat inconvenient for them.
Therefore, I believe it is indeed important for feature development to take into account the potential impact of cultural background, age differences, and long-term user habits.

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8

Unfortunately these two responses are incompatible, since there is no timeline / mobile scrolling widget on topics with nested replies.

Either press # on desktop, or on mobile: click on the 1/100 posts thing and then you will see a “Jump to”

And yes, there are discoverability issues here.

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9

We added the timeline to nested this week, but we found the approach we used there lacking and reverted it after a couple of hours.

Still trying to come up with a good design for it.

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10

i know it is somewhat relative, but i just have to say that my forum’s user demographic is predominantly in the 40 to 70 age range with a bunch even older, and i have never had a complaint about post order in topics since i have been admin there (6 years and counting). but also noting the majority are north american or european.

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