If you’ve enabled nested replies on your site, you can now let members sort replies by Hot. This sort order surfaces the discussions people are actually engaging with right now, rather than just the most-liked or most recent posts.
Why you’d want it
Top sorting rewards replies that accumulated likes over the lifetime of a topic, which tends to freeze early popular posts at the top. New sorting shows you the latest activity, but with no sense of what’s worth reading. Hot sits in between: it favors replies that are getting likes and replies recently, so an active conversation deep in a topic can rise to the top while it’s happening — and gracefully sink back down as it cools off.
This matters more with nested replies than in a flat topic, because activity often happens inside sub-threads. Hot sorting accounts for that: when a reply buried three levels deep takes off, its parent thread rises too, so readers can actually find it.
How it works
Each reply gets a hot score based on three things:
- Engagement - likes and direct replies, weighted and log-scaled so a runaway post doesn’t dominate forever
- Freshness - a bonus for new posts that decays with a half-life of 7 days, so recent contributions get a fair shot against established ones
- Thread activity - a hot reply passes its score up to its ancestors (minus a small penalty per level), so the threads containing hot discussion bubble up, not just the individual posts
On the technical side, hot scores are demand-driven. nothing is calculated for topics nobody is sorting by hot. The first time someone requests hot sorting on a topic, the scores are computed in a background job and cached. That request falls back to top sorting; subsequent visits get the real thing. Cached scores are considered fresh for 30 minutes — after that, the next request still gets the cached ordering instantly while a refresh is queued in the background.
A couple of sensible shortcuts: very small topics (5 posts or fewer) and topics with no new posts in 30 days simply use top sorting, since there’s nothing meaningful for a hot score to add there. In practice this means hot sorting adds essentially zero load for the parts of your site where it wouldn’t make a difference.
How to enable it
- Nested replies has to be enabled on the site, and for the topic (either through the global default, or category setting)
- Enable
nested replies hot sort enabledin your admin settings. This makeshotappear in the sort options - You can optionally set it as the default sort order in
Nested replies default sort
The scoring formula (like weight, reply weight, freshness half-life, and more) is tunable via hidden site settings if you need to adjust it for your community’s pace, but the defaults are designed to work well out of the box.
Happy Discoursing!