Currently the list of topics can be sorted by replies, views and activity.
What about sorting by title?
Example: Here are some user guides I have created for users, I used a nomenclature for the titles. It would he helpful if the users could sort on title.
Iâd like that feature, too. In my case, it is for a category with topics that Iâd like sorted by date as each topic has a video recording of a council meeting and it would easiest to digest them in chronological order in terms of finding meetings and having a sense of what is going on in the town.
I found a work around if anyone else reads this thread looking for how they can sort their topics in a category in chronological order of some sort. See this thread:
Just wanted to cross reference a post of a user asking for support as they had a difficult time finding a meeting thread in a category. If sorting be alphanumeric was available, this would not be an issue for us.
Here is the category in question:
Hi,
The ability to sort a topic list alphabetically by title would also be helpful for when Discourse is deployed as an intranet.
For instance, in MacOS, Windows, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. âsort by nameâ is a default or common way to organize files. When Discourse is being used for a staff directory, to provide easy access to policy documents, to provide notes from a regular meeting, and for other common use cases in an intranet, âsort by nameâ would be a natural and preferred way to organize content within a Category.
Iâd use this to list topics tagged #recommendations.
Currently I manually maintain an âindexâ topic with links in alphabetical order to individal recommendations topics, and an automated index page with alphabetical sorting by title would save me a lot of time
This would be amazing
Alphabetically sorting would also be useful for me,
Iâm building a directory with the tags and i beleive it would be worth to sort the dentists per title.
I would force them to add there name first
I donât see why you shouldnât be able to sort by any column label in the list:
You can currently sort by replies, views, and activity⊠why not topic as well?
This feature was removed after it was pointed out that the alphabetical sort is nonsensical for the Latest view.
For a knowledge base, consider using the /docs view of the Knowledge Explorer plugin instead?
Are there any plans to ever bring back alphabetical topic sort again?
Not at the moment, I can see in the context of docs though that makes sense. Docs - Discourse Meta. Indeed docs does allow you to sort alphabetically.
If Iâm not mistaken, Docs only allows you to sort categories and tags alpabetically. Not the topics. Iâd love to have this so that I can present the docs in a particular, sequential order.
Edit: I was wrong. You can click the topic list headers - it wasnât obvious because there is no arrow indicating activity sort by default.
thanks for pointing this out. Does anyone know with the Docs plugin, if thereâs a way to make it all alphabetical by default? Right now the sorting needs to be done manually by the user
See this topic where I shared a modification for sorting alphabetically. I hope they officially integrate it into Docs in some way Modifying Discourse Docs to only allow for sorting by Title - dev - Discourse Meta
thanks a lot! really appreciate your method, Iâll definitely give it a try! and I agree, alphabetic sorting is a great feature that a lot of us really need. Thanks again!
Thanks for keeping this thread alive. I know that there are strong feelings about alpha sort NOT becoming an option, and many use cases have been proposed, all responded to with defenses of tags and other sorts of search.
Iâd love it if someone could suggest a way for me to handle the following use case:
I have 25 topics, each containing a video up for discussion.
Itâs important that people work through the videos in the right order.
So, if I number the topics and have an alpha sort, weâre done. The user can start at the top, and work their way down. All they have to remember is where they left off and pick up next time.
BUT
If I use any of the many existing sort options, they get scrambled. The one possible hack is creation date, but that makes it really difficult for me to edit the list in any useful way.
Am I misunderstanding my use case, or am I stuck? I asked the bot, but he gave up.
Thanks.
@codinghorror Jeff, not sure if this hit your radarâŠ
thanks for considering.
Could you edit the topic timestamps to create the order you need? For instance, I changed these ones to be 1 hour apart (00:00, 01:00, 02:00), and then that would allow me to insert up to 59 extra topics in between (with a little timestamp tweak) if I wanted to add in 'Lesson 1.1, Lesson 1.2, etc later). Would that work for you?
(With the category in âcreated atâ order).
Though changing the timestamp once theyâve accrued replies would also change the reply timestamps as well, but if youâre adding a new one this might not affect anything.
Though I admit, itâs not a replacement for allowing a set order of topics in a category, which may be the ideal solution. 
yep, thatâs the workaround, but of course, the beauty of a community-built software solution is that perhaps we can avoid thatâŠ
thanks @JammyDodger
We currently have a new /filters endpoint for logged in users. (Full topic here)
I checked in with @tgxworld and it seems like doing order:title wasnât too difficult, and he has made an addition is pending review and merge.
Wondering if this is suitable for you?
if the admin can set this as the default for a given topic, itâs going to get the job done, thank you @nat
is there a way to know when itâs working?
