Home page: Latest posts + Top posts columns

I want the home page of my forum to be as interesting as possible. Interest is both a function of recency (which is why news are so big) and something like overall quality (which is why we read old books but don’t read old news).

Hacker News and Reddit do this well: the front page effectively mixes new posts and older popular posts, successfully maximizing overall interestingness.

However, I can’t figure out how to make Discourse front page do anything like this. The default is only showing posts with most recent responses, which encourages never-ending discussions and novelty and penalizes high-quality but relatively self-contained posts that don’t attract regular responses.

You can make categories + latest posts the default home page, but this seems to be just making things worse by hiding indicators of interestingness (like number of views) and distracting people from topics themselves

Are there any plans to allow sorting the front page by “hot” or are there any working plugins that do this (I was unable to find one). I would guess that this would be a fairly popular feature. In fact, I think meta.discourse.org would be more interesting if front page topics were sorted by hotness.

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It has been requested a few times. However, if you think /latest is …

… I’m pretty sure /top would be like that too, but in some ways have even worse characteristics.

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