Reordering a topic by ‘most liked’ or threaded replies

I’m interested in sorting the replies when looking at a single post. I want the replies underneath to be sorted by the number of likes. Is this possible? What kinds of hacky plugins or workarounds are possible here? are there plans to implement heirarchical reply threading (a la reddit or stack overflow), which would make this easier?

Hey Brady. What do you mean by fix threading?

hey! by threading I mean reply threading - organizing replies to replies in a heirarchical manner the way reddit or stack overflow does. I read in another post that part of the complexity of implementing this sort feature is in part due to lack of reply threading

Yes, we need it too. I hope this will be implemented soon.

yeah. These are critical features. I will be using AskBot instead because discourse does not offer it.

If discourse offered sorting replies by likes, threaded replies, and indicating one reply as the a correct answer, I would use it in a heartbeat. Alas, it does not

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With Discourse Post Voting Plugin you can sort answers by votes

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We have Discourse Solved Plugin that can do this. :+1: You can see it in action in several of our categories here on Meta, including support

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And there is one very ground rule too that is a limitation of system — from my point of view anyway. Likes don’t tell how usefull or ”right” a comment/answer is. Likes tell how much popularity it got. Totally different thing. We are very deep in thinking where triljon of flies can’t be wrong and only those users, who have competense high enough, click like-button. And that’s not the situation.

And that’s why likes should not be part of trust level, reactions are better solution for topics/posts and amount of likes can not be used as a metric telling if an answer is good, bad or even right.

So, I think the right answer here is not building system that sort answers per amount of likes (unless topic is a popularity content), but using solutions like Discourse Solved as JammyDodger offered.l

It really depends on the use-case. Coders on stack overflow (or in my case, people looking for tax advice) aren’t throwing out likes out of a popularity contest. they like a comment if the content is correct and functional. Up/down voting provides real time validation for falsifiable advice, so we can get to the truth quicker.

for softer, unfalsifiable claims, perhaps you are right

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thank you for pointing this out! great feature!

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In that case I’m afraid the answer is no. The current nature of threading in Discourse is by design and we don’t consider it something that requires fixing.

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I think it really clutters and confuses the experience, but I’m sure y’all have heard it all before. luckily Post Voting has me covered :handshake:

thanks for your help!

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well actualy, if you’re talking about threading, there is a large camp of people believing that threads are more confusing than flat discussions[1].


  1. with which I agree ↩︎

I agree with you, and would use it too, if available.

The number of likes shows the popularity of a certain topic. And exactly for this reason, it must be easily accessed.

It doesn’t necessarily need to say whether the topic is right or wrong, but rather that a lot of people liked it… and therefore it should be more easily found by other members, especially on forums with tens of thousands of topics (where it’s very easy to get lost).

I tried to do this partially… If you want to see the most liked posts, just click on the “Most Liked” link, which I placed in the top menu, with the path: top?order=likes

One problem is that when users sort by another type, such as Replies or Views, the “Likes” column disappears. :frowning:

Also disappears when I choose a category (so seeing most liked topics of a category is not an easy task) :frowning:

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Update: I can see in this forum, when you choose any category, let’s say cameras, it already shows LIKE column.

Is there any new setting i can adjust?

There’s a theme component available that can show the like column: Add Likes Column

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