It’s unclear what determines topic order in category ‘Latest’ view

[Moin]

I was very confused when I visited the Contribute > Feature category today. The topics seemed out of order. So I clicked “latest” again, hoping to get a topic list that is somehow ordered by date. But still, the result looked like this https://meta.discourse.org/c/feature/2/l/latest:

I didn’t expect the topic-voting plugin to affect the ‘Latest’ sort. For me, ‘latest’ implies it’s ordered by date.

It’s already confusing that it’s not easy to know if a category’s latest list is ordered by the date of last activity (default) or by the date of topic creation (e.g. News and Events > Blog). But latest being ordered by votes was even more confusing.

And while you can use the table heading to order the topics the way you expect them, this is more difficult as soon as these headings are not available. Finding the latest topic in the blog category on mobile (or any small viewport) is difficult. You need to use search or the topic filter. I think it’s similar when you use Horizon or the topic cards theme component.

All in all, I think there are multiple problems interacting in this case.

1. I didn’t expect latest to be ordered by votes, especially because there is a separate link in the nav bar to order by votes that was not highlighted. My mental model is that “Latest” always means chronological order.
2. When you visit a category, it’s not obvious what determines the order of topics (activity, created, votes).
3. Depending on your device and theme, it’s not easy to change the order of the topics

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

Yes, I caused this the other day by changing the default sort on latest… and was similarly kind of at a loss for the options we present:

We do have the ability to change the default filter (default topic list)… I started off with this, but then realized that ordering for votes appeared differently for anons? haven’t dug into why that is yet.

So then I noticed that there’s another option topic list sort by where votes is also an option, and this one is consistently sorted for everyone… so I used that.

We should probably not have votes in topic list sort by (because it’s not a sortable column) and rely on default topic list and sort out why that wasn’t working as expected.

[Moin]

@awesomerobot

This is kind of the default “homepage” of the category, isn’t it? When I select top, then I get

where it’s quite obvious that this is /top and not /latest. If I want latest instead, I can use the nav bar to see latest instead.
It also works with “votes”. It’s obvious that this is ordered by votes

What is confusing for me is when

@awesomerobot

is changed, because that changes how /latest works without a visible indicator of what determines the order. I like Custom Topic Sort Order Button because it makes all the order options available to users, so I can change the order to what I expected, even on mobile. If the current order was preselected, it would also work as an indicator to help me understand the current order.